January 2026 copy - Flipbook - Page 62
Making the Switch To Genuine
Black Powder...
How Tough Is It???
by JonnyV
Real Black Powder comes in several granulation sizes
from 1F to 4F. It remains to be seen if Goex (Old Eysford) ever makes it back into production.
We occasionally get comments on YouTube videos,
or Facebook posts from
people who are thinking
about making the jump to
black powder. One of the
comments we see on occasion is about “lowering the
bar of entry“ and allowing
people to shoot smokeless
powder at certain matches as a way to entice them
into the realm of shooting
black powder. On the surface, this may seem like
a good idea. Let me tell
62
you about how I made the
jump…
I had been involved in
some private shooting
events for a year or two
with a group of guys. We
would gather at a private
ranch and shoot it dingers
placed anywhere from 200
to 990 yards out. Almost
everybody was shooting
smokeless powder. Usually, it was a light charge of
unique or 3031, occasionally 5744 and everybody
had fun. Some people
even managed to hit with
consistency. There were a
couple of guys there who
shot black powder.
I would watch them. I
would swear up and down
I was never going down
that black powder road
and I would tell myself
that I had the better end of
the stick shooting smokeless. My mind was full of
a bunch of reasons I had
been told by other people
(who knew just as little
about black powder as
I did) and they justi昀椀ed
my decision to stay with
smokeless. Black powder
was really dirty. It was
super expensive and very
hard to clean up. No one
could really tell you how to
load black powder either.
There was a lot of voodoo
surrounding the whole
topic. I had tried some
of the smokeless powder
substitutes such as Pyrodex and triple seven. In
fact, I did have problems
cleaning up after that experiment. Turns out the
substitutes are hard to
clean up after, and they reModern BPCR Shooter - January, 2026
