Flintlock pistol, rifle.

Or start with a small charge and fire over some pale background where you can see unburnt powder granules. Keep increasing the charge by small increments until you see such granules lying in front of the muzzle. The increment before that represents the maximum charge of that specific batch of powder that'll burn in that specific barrel, with the ball you're using.

More powder won't blow up the barrel, increase pressure, or velocity - just waste the extra powder.

I call this the Davy Crockett method - with NO historical justification I know of, just that I heard it's what the old backwoodsmen used to do every time they came back from town with a new keg of powder.

Edited By Mick B1 on 14/09/2022 15:11:37

That can depend on the type of powder, polished or matt type.

Fine or coarse powder.

I don't know whether unpolished powder is available in graded granule size, but AFAIK polished is usually preferable for consistent performance in smallarms.

In my day FFG (sort of granulated-sugar fine) was usual for longarms, FFFG (a bit more like table-salt fine) for pistols.

But I used modern substitutes like Pyrodex and H777 which took a proper primer flame to ignite, because I didn't want to be storing in the house something that could go with a random spark ...

Edited By Mick B1 on 14/09/2022 20:19:22

The polished shiny powder was used as a trade with natives, another name for it was trade powder. it was well known that polished powder was not as easy to ignite as the matt courser powder.

Re Pyrodex. since been found to be quite dangerous as ignition could become a detonation. I stopped using it and reverted back to black powder.

I used the O/U BP shotgun for hunting and apart from the time to reload was as good or I might say better than a cartridge shotgun. It certainly brought down the birds. Recoil was less as well.

One thing I noticed was that the dog did not like the BP gun but was fine with a cartridge gun.