Gun cotton colour ?

[Christoff]

I'm currently making some replica Great War Jam tin bombs or in this condensed milk tins (No8/9 grenade) for a photo set up I'm working on for a future book publication called "Remembering Tommy " published by History Press, due out in October 2013.

Can anyone tell me the colour of gun cotton ? One of the tins will be open to show the contents. I'm using cotton wool as a gun cotton sub, so I need to get the colour right or as close as . Was it white, off white, buff, brown ? Any help you guys can offer will be greatly appreciated .

Forum members kindly helped me when I was undertaking my Mills grenade box/ det tin/ dets, project early in the summer. I will of course be acknowledging the forum for the help I receive/received .

Kind Regards

Christoff

 

[siegfreid]

It can be most any colour but usually off white . If memory serves , it actually looks a bit like papier mache & not so much cotton wool . Hope this helps .

 

[Songun 4.25]

It is usually white to off white, the external appearance is very close to regular cotton. Very old sampels can turn into a brownish color. (I read somewhere that one of the first samples made by Friedrich Schnbein is still preserved today. It has turned to a brown color, but the nitrogen content is still very high)

Industrial gun cotton comes usually in form a granulate or it is pressed into blocks, because you have to berak down the fiber structure of the cotton to get it really free from any traces of acid during production. (Thats why the first gun cotton factories and magazines blew up on a regular basis; they made the nitrocellulose in "cotton" form and were unable to get rid of the last traces of acid.) Are you sure that these Jam tin grenades where filled with this kind of guncotton? By the time of WWI, the production methods of nitrocellulose were already refined, so there was no more nitrocellulose in fiber form produced.