[lightarrow]

Potassium Nitrate manufacture:

1. Place a charcoal filter at the bottom of a large strainer. You can make a charcoal filter by spreading fine wood ash  between two pieces of cloth.
2. Fill strainer with nitrate-rich earth. The best sources of rich earth is well tended farm lands and decaying cellar floors.
3. Pour boiling water slowly over the earth.
4. Collect the water that drips out of the the strainer.
5. Strain the sludge out of this water.
6. Boil off half the water allow to cool.
7. Add an equal measure of alcohol to the water.
8. Filter through paper. (i.e. Coffee filter)
9. White Saltpeter crystals will collect on the paper (if you couldn't guess this is the potassium nitrate.)

I don't know if this procedure works, never tried.

[weed4me]

I saw this on Tv. it involved getting a bucket, filling it with soil from your garden, peeing on it, then waiting a while. when it dries there are small white crystals left behind. and apparently this is saltpetre. never tried it though. kinda ties in with whats said above lol

"You have to stay in shape. My grandmother, she started walking five miles a day when she was 60. She's 97 today and we don't know where the hell she is."

[fireemblem555]

Urine is extremely high in potassium and nitrites, so the creation of potassium nitrate from urine is very possible.  I think that it was often filtered through buckets of straw in order to be synthesized.

[Bored chemist]

"Urine is extremely high in potassium and nitrites"
I doubt that.

[lightarrow]

"Urine is extremely high in potassium and nitrites"
I doubt that.

Yes. I would worry very much in that case!

[daveshorts]

I think you need to use stale urine - it was made in a heap of manure kept moist, but not wet so it is oxygenated. It is also mixed with wood ash which will provide the potassium. Bacteria then oxidise the urea to nitrates and you then after about a year you wash out the potassium nitrate with water.

[paul.fr]

I think you need to use stale urine -

you are correct, Dave. Also the morning urine of heavy drinkers was prefered. Saltpeter is produced by bacteria that feed on decaying organic matter; the ammonium-rich liquid produced by heavy drinkers enhanced/s bacterial activity

[Packy]

I once heard when I was a boy (1946) that in the past, in Tudor England, when they cleaned out their Mansions, the straw on the floor was collected by the Saltpeter man.  I can well believe that.  However I was talking to a real 'expert' on Tudor England & he hadn't heard of it.  Can anyone out there enlighten me on it

[Geezer]

I think at one point in Paris, the citizens were required to dump their urine into pits for this purpose. I have not been able to find a reference to confirm this.

[mayur]

Saltpeter is a mixture composed of many substances extracted with fire and water from arid and manurial soils, from that growth which exudes from new walls or from that loosened soil that is found in tombs or uninhabited caves where the rain cannot enter. It is my belief that it is engendered in these soils from an airy moisture that is drunk in and absorbed by the earthy dryness..