When you say you made your own black powder, did you make the salt petre too? I have a lot of questions, and I believe your answers could well be dull enough for this group.

They used to make salt petre, since replaced with ammonia derived explosives and fertilizers, turned into nitric acid then explosives and the like, by suspending a canvas sheet off the ground, covered from the rain, and putting manure, straw, and rancid piss on it and turning it for months. The salt petre would accumulate under the canvas.

They used to pay people for their piss, and it's the source of the saying, so poor they don't have a pot to piss in.

Anyway it's like 80% of black powder if I recall, most of the rest sulphur, and a bit of charcoal, that is the actual fuel. The salt petre provides a kind of stored oxygen for the reactio as I understand it, and sulphur makes it happen.

Now I know what you are going to say, they used bat guano to make it, much from chile, and that's true, it was easier that way then the more traditional way but they were running out and the industrialists put a bounty on making something like ammonia.

A frenchman almost did it passing steam over burning charcoal, in an open environment or something and horribly disfigured himself. Then some german figured to in a closed environment to pass steam and air under great pressure in the presence of a catalyst like platinum, or something like that.