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Norma powders


Zaitsev

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All: following the information provided by Londonhunter regarding the possible instability of Vihtavouri I was prompted to investigate the demise in supply of Norma powders. In short, nobody imports them and no major importer is inclined at present to commence doing so for a variety of reasons.

My question is did anyone use Norma when they were available and would anyone use them now if they were available?

If the powders are anything like the rest of the Norma products they ought to be high quality and would provide hand loaders with another option, more felxibility and perhaps a degree of resilience if we lose Viht.

Thoughts please ladies and gents.

Regards

G

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Sadly not. Even the larger importers with existing facilities considered it a non starter due to cost, time, red tape etc. Not being conversant with the supply, transport and regulations covering HAZMAT such as powders it is difficult for me to say where exactly the problem lies. Perhaps some of the trade bods on here would care to comment?

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I used Norma powders every now and then in the good ('bad?) old days when they were available. Excellent powders, but they were expensive compared to Viht, ICI Nobel, and even the US powders at the time, so they didn't sell well.

 

At that time, Hercules (now Alliant) only had one rifle powder, Reloder 7, otherwise the range was all pistol grades. Then the company introduced a new rifle range and the word soon got round that they were the direct equivalents of Norma powders (both made by Bofors in Sweden), Re15 same as N202, Re22 same as MRP etc and as they were a LOT cheaper than Norma, there wasn't much sense in buying the latter.

 

This will still be an issue today. I doubt if Norma powders offer anything not available in the Alliant rifle powder range.

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I used Norma powders every now and then in the good ('bad?) old days when they were available. Excellent powders, but they were expensive compared to Viht, ICI Nobel, and even the US powders at the time, so they didn't sell well.

 

At that time, Hercules (now Alliant) only had one rifle powder, Reloder 7, otherwise the range was all pistol grades. Then the company introduced a new rifle range and the word soon got round that they were the direct equivalents of Norma powders (both made by Bofors in Sweden), Re15 same as N202, Re22 same as MRP etc and as they were a LOT cheaper than Norma, there wasn't much sense in buying the latter.

 

This will still be an issue today. I doubt if Norma powders offer anything not available in the Alliant rifle powder range.

Laurie,

I frittered away my last can of Norma 200 (£10) on a 223 plinker load,and have felt guilty ever since,but you have been therapeutic indeed,as I have never really liked the reloader powders,so it does not seem such a crime. Nobel were a little cagey about equating their powders to another brand,but it's all gone with the wind anyhow!

george

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Hi George.

 

I remember N200 too - a great fine-grained powder for .222 Rem and 50s. So far as I'm aware, that was one grade that didn't have an Alliant equivalent.

 

I imagine it would work well too with the PPCs, 6BR with light bullets and similar. I picked three tins of it up for some bargain price many years ago when York Guns had a tidy-up of their old cramped central York premises and found a stache of ICI-Nobel and Norma powders that had been hidden away for years. I bought all the rifle grades for I think £7 per tin compared to maybe £12 or £13 for everything else at that time. If only we could still get powders at those prices ...... !!

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Hi George.

 

I remember N200 too - a great fine-grained powder for .222 Rem and 50s. So far as I'm aware, that was one grade that didn't have an Alliant equivalent.

 

I imagine it would work well too with the PPCs, 6BR with light bullets and similar. I picked three tins of it up for some bargain price many years ago when York Guns had a tidy-up of their old cramped central York premises and found a stache of ICI-Nobel and Norma powders that had been hidden away for years. I bought all the rifle grades for I think £7 per tin compared to maybe £12 or £13 for everything else at that time. If only we could still get powders at those prices ...... !!

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Hi George.

 

I remember N200 too - a great fine-grained powder for .222 Rem and 50s. So far as I'm aware, that was one grade that didn't have an Alliant equivalent.

 

I imagine it would work well too with the PPCs, 6BR with light bullets and similar. I picked three tins of it up for some bargain price many years ago when York Guns had a tidy-up of their old cramped central York premises and found a stache of ICI-Nobel and Norma powders that had been hidden away for years. I bought all the rifle grades for I think £7 per tin compared to maybe £12 or £13 for everything else at that time. If only we could still get powders at those prices ...... !!

...and any bullet as long as it was 52 g . Simples!

george

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Hi George.

 

I remember N200 too - a great fine-grained powder for .222 Rem and 50s. So far as I'm aware, that was one grade that didn't have an Alliant equivalent.

 

I imagine it would work well too with the PPCs, 6BR with light bullets and similar. I picked three tins of it up for some bargain price many years ago when York Guns had a tidy-up of their old cramped central York premises and found a stache of ICI-Nobel and Norma powders that had been hidden away for years. I bought all the rifle grades for I think £7 per tin compared to maybe £12 or £13 for everything else at that time. If only we could still get powders at those prices ...... !!

Laurie, I'm a little young to remember the Nobel stuff (aside from my dad using it to reload shotgun cases). Can you outline what happened to them please?

 

Thanks

 

G

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They were made in Ayrshire somewhere in the huge Ardeer / Stevenston complex and explosives including the original 'dynamite' had been made there since the 1870s originally under Nobel ownership. This enterprise was a major founding component of the ICI combine when it was created in 1926. It didn't only produce explosives and propellants as many of the ingredients made on site had other uses, so it was a general chemicals producer too.

 

I don't know when handloading powders were first produced - after WW2 I would think. When I started handloading around '82 you still occasionally saw early green painted 'ICI-Nobel Glasgow' almost cubic tins appearing, but they'd moved onto battleship grey painted steel tins that were a rectangular shape. These still turn up quite often and I sometimes see requests for loads data on forums from people who've acquired the powder from somewhere. I believe the company came out of the market in 1988 after a serious accident involving its products (explosives for fireworks, not handloading powders) that saw a lorry or van carrying powder catch fire and then explode. Today's explosives transport regulations date from this incident.

 

Back when I started handloading, ICI-Nobel was the only horse in town apart from the US powders - Hercules (all pistol bar Re7), Hodgdon (whose stick powders were all made by ICI in any case) and DuPont IMR brand rifle powders. Hercules was widely stocked as everybody used Bullseye and Unique etc, but the US rifle powders were pretty patchy and unreliable from a supply point of view.

 

There were 4 rifle powders - Rifle No. 0, 1, 2, and 3 in slow to fast burning rate order. 0 was pretty similar to Vihtavuori N160, 1 to N140, 2 to N135, and 3 to N133 in applications and burning rates. They were all single-base extruded types 0 and 1 being pretty (very!) long grained and not well suited to powder measures, not that I could afford such a fancy bit of kit as a powder measure back then. That's what we had Lee scoops for! I was into historic military arms stuff at the time so I used 'Rifle 1' for just about everything I loaded for - mostly .303, and .30-06.

 

There was a slightly larger range of shotgun / pistol / revolver powders, actually called by those three names. 'Shotgun 80' was used in .38 Spcl target loads like Bullseye if I remember right, but I wan't into loading for pistols at the time. 'Revolver 1' was the slowest burner for magnum revolver cartridges and could also be used in low velocity rifle loads and rifle lead bullet loads, akin to Hercules / Alliant 2400.

 

When ICI was broken up and sold off in the late 90s, the residual facilities at Ardeer went to some foreign owned chemicals company. It's still there although most of it is derelict today - there are several series of photographs on the web taken by enthusiasts who go around such places. I don't know if anything is still made there, but am pretty sure some bits survive as explosive stores and for explosives testing - it was a natural place to make and store explosives as it's a natural sand dunes peninsula and Nobel, later ICI installed vast numbers of separated blockhouses in deep depressions, surrounded by blast walls to funnel explosions upwards into the air. You occasionally see this side of Ardeer in TV documentaries about explosions and explosives.

 

At its peak ~13,000 people worked there and were bussed in from neighbouring villages and towns. It also had its own railway station and workers' trains not available to the general public until 1966, and there was an extensive on-site industrial railway network and private sidings to both move materials around on site and also to receive and despatch them from and to the national rail network. I feel sad when I think of all the work and earnings and jobs that have gone from there as with so much British industry. Its rundown and closure must have been a disaster in a largely rural area like South Ayrshire.

 

Shortly after I started handloading, the first Viht powders appeared, N140 and N160 for rifle cartridges in steel blue and orange 800 gram tins, and Viht quickly made big inroads into ICI-Nobel sales. It was cheaper, cleaner burning and had shorter better metering kernels.

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  • 5 years later...
1 hour ago, Zaitsev said:

Have the restrictions on other powders caused an importer re-think?

Apparently so. The word I hear is that RUAG tried to get premium prices initially and generated little interest among  retailers as a result, but has now dropped its prices enough to persuade a fair few outlets to stock them. 203-B grade which appears to be identical to Alliant Re15 now sells for a bit less than its US sourced equivalent, so is a good buy for any users of that grade.

I've looked closely at the current Norma range (but not tried anything in actual loads to date) and it does have a lot going for it although it is more or less as it was many years ago with one significant addition. They are very 'competent' propellants that combine high specific energy values with good density so allow a great deal of energy to be packed into the case where space is at a premium. All grades are double-based, but with three exceptions the nitroglycerin content is under 10%, and in many cases down at around 4 or 5%.

Norma 204 is an excellent replacement for the now gone IMR and Hodgdon 4350 grades and will match or more usually improve on their performance in suitable applications. So this is one that users of the popular mid-size 6.5s ought to look at, as well as 'traditional' 4350 users (30-06, 7X57mm, short 300 magnums etc). The sole recent addition to the range, Norma URP (Universal Rifle Powder), is a little faster burning than H4350 / N204 but is one of the three grades with higher nitroglycerin levels and is an impressive performer in its bracket, so is an alternative to Reload Swiss RS60 / Alliant Re17, H4350, Viht N550. I've not seen anybody say so to date, but I suspect that being a little faster burning than N204 / H4350, it may be extremely well suited to the 6.5X47 Lapua.

The downside of the older Norma powders - can't comment on newer grades - is that they have a reputation for being temperature affected. Norma 203-B / Alliant Re15 is notorious in this respect. Bofors in Karlskoga, Sweden which manufacturers these powders and is part of the same industrial group as Norma, has introduced some apparently very impressive high-performance and as good as Hodgdon / ADI temperature stable grades, but which have so far been restricted to the Alliant range, notably Re16. I'm hoping we will see this bofors product whether in Alliant or Norma form soon as it is getting rave reviews in the US particularly from high performance 6mm and 6.5mm smaller cartridge users.

 

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This is a better chart than that provided by RUAG UK - it's the same thing but has an explanation of how the values were obtained attached underneath.

https://www.norma.cc/en/Ammunition-Academy/om-handladdning/brinntider-for-krut/

If you look at this, you'll see that a unique method of obtaining burn rate values is employed. Instead of the standard industry 'closed bomb' experiments, it uses a single cartridge and load combination in a test barrel reading both pressure and MV and taking IMR-4350 as the baseline with 100 ascribed to both values. The cartridge is 308 Win with 43.2gn of whatever powder under a 143gn FMJ bullet.

This has pluses and minuses: plus in that it uses a real life cartridge loading in a real barrel; minus in that many (most?) of the powders are at best marginally suitable for the cartridge / load, so you've got to wonder how reprsentative their values actually are. It is also an old chart as I first saw it in Norma's Reloading Manual 1st edition which was published in 2004 and so may predate that. Comparing the two, it has not been updated except for the inclusion of N217 and URP. So, in addition to the usual caveats about burning rate charts, some of the propellants in it may have changed a little, or even a lot. XMR-4350 no longer exists for instance in that form, (but we can actually still buy it as Lovex SO70).

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As I said, it is the same chart, but has the important explanation of what it tells you and how it was obtained tacked on the end if you scroll down. As this is a unique way of producing such a chart, it's useful - if not essential - to know how it varies from other burning rate charts and what it's trying to tell you.

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18 hours ago, Moorlander said:

Some burn info here

£47.00 500gm Here

Hmm, spendy, especially when RS powders are around £75-£80kg

Personally I'd like to try N217 but unless the Norma distributors lower their prices a bit, I don't see Norma powders challenging Viht or RS for market dominance. If I were Norma, I would have really pushed UK sales big time, coming in low to gain market traction.

Shame really as they have a very good opportunity given that most Hodgdon / IMR powders are banned now. 

Ho hum. 

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1 hour ago, Catch-22 said:

Hmm, spendy, especially when RS powders are around £75-£80kg

Personally I'd like to try N217 but unless the Norma distributors lower their prices a bit, I don't see Norma powders challenging Viht or RS for market dominance. If I were Norma, I would have really pushed UK sales big time, coming in low to gain market traction.

Shame really as they have a very good opportunity given that most Hodgdon / IMR powders are banned now. 

Ho hum. 

Where you buying RS at £75 ? I havent seen it that cheap for years.RS62 , so the Norma is only £3.00 more per KG.

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