Unique

The Universal Powder.

- John Haviland

Like most folks who take up the hobby, I started hand loading a couple of cartridges. As time passed, my hand loading expanded to include a growing number of guns and an ever-increasing amount of powders to feed them. Unique is the one powder that was there from the start and remains close at hand, because it is the most versatile powder on the market for reloading shot shells, handgun cartridges and midrange velocity and reduced-powder loads in rifles cartridges.

The manufacture of Unique has changed hands several times since it was developed in 1899 by Laflin & Rand and manufactured in Haskell, New Jersey. DuPont took over manufacturing at the Haskell plant in 1902. In 1912 the DuPont company was broken up in an antitrust suit, and its double-based powders went to the Hercules Powder Company. In turn, Hercules sold its smokeless powder business to Alliant Techsystems in 1994. The new company, Alliant Powder, moved from the Hercules factory in Kenvil, New Jersey, to the Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Radford, Virginia, where Unique is manufactured today.

Unique is a double-based powder composed of 20 percent nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose. “Nitroglycerine is, in fact, hydrophobic,” said Ben Amonette, Alliant Powder’s product manager, “so it is more resistant to moisture gain or loss than a lower nitroglycerine material or single-base powder. This does not mean that Unique or any of our other double-base products are impervious to moisture; they are just less affected.”

Amonette said Unique’s production process does not coat powder flakes with nitroglycerine, as in the impregnation-type process other manufacturers might use. “Rather, the nitroglycerine is collided with the nitrocellulose base and uniformly mixed with all ingredients except coatings prior to extrusion.”