All I have ever used is IMR 8208 XBR in the black bottle with the black and gold label. It works really well for the applications I use it for. It's like butter for my guns. Just not the same without it!
-
If you are having trouble with your password change please click here for help.
Reloading supplies future
- Thread starter Bulldog Man
- Start date
The reality is that smokeless powders nowadays (and pretty much forever) have been formulated for military consumption.
A powder like 8208 XBR was probably formulated for a specific military contract, and there's a good chance that ADI (yes, ADI, not IMR) would only make another batch to go thru' the mill if another order came up for the military. It would make good sense to just run the mill for a bit longer and make a railcar-sized batch to sell on the commercial market.
That's almost certainly one of the reasons that we can't get Trail Boss now. From what I understand it was a very unusual powder milling process for a specific use, and when ADI's manufacturing plant burned, they couldn't produce it. Whoever the original intended clients were, they found an alternative and even when ADI got back off the ground, the original contract had aged out or been cancelled. I've seen it said somewhere that Trail Boss was a military powder specifically for one family of howitzer shells.
As reloaders, we're a very small fraction of the worldwide demand for powder, and what we have available to us is basically the sweepings from the floor of whatever the military wanted to buy, or the overrun on a military contract that has been specially processed in some way (a lot of what differentiates the powders we use are additives which are sprayed on during manufacture, grain size and how short the "sticks" in stick powders are).
Hodgdon get a lot of **** talking for their dominance of the industry, but they're a middleman that can only really sell product that is available on the commercial market - and that's often military overproduction. They have sufficient market presence on the purchase side to actually negotiate and make a meaningful purchase of 30 tons of military powder, package, store and distribute it in a way that only a large company can. Manufacturers probably like working with them because they're big enough to purchase the entire overage from a production run, which makes life easy for the powder mill because otherwise they'd have to store a pile of powder.
I'm sure there are still ways to buy an odd 55-gallon-size cardboard drum of pulled down BLC-(2), but companies that do sell it are likely to be few and far between. Often because the mills can't be bothered to sell their overproduction in pickup-truck sized batches.
