Bulk black powder

[Turnup]

The last time I read about this all you had to do to designate your house/property as an explosive store was to contact the council and inform them and inform the local fire brigade so they knew what to expect if called out.

It may have changed but if you do want to classify your property as an explosive store it might be worth checking with the council or fire brigade.

Primers and the powder in loaded ammunition now count towards the maximum weight of stored explosive. I have the figures somewhere I'll see if I can find them.

Not quite so simple.

Firstly there is a charge of (IIRC) £85 every three years.

Secondly they will not designate an explosive store just anywhere and I doubt that in a residential area would be acceptable.

How do I know?

I shoot at an indoor range which is shared by 5 clubs. We have a common armoury (with separate individual security lock ups). Our FEO, who was a complete plonker and just out to be awkward, added up all the maximum ammunition holdings of all the clubs, assumed factory loads, and announced that this was in excess of the maximum permitted so he was going to reduce all our ammo holdings to get below the magic number. Logical reasoning such as "But it will never occur that all clubs hold their maximum at the same time" or "But the energy limits for this range do not allow us to load to factory levels so all the ammo here is either .22rf or downloaded" fell on deaf ears. We registered the range as an explosive store and told him to swivel. This was just one example of that man being totally jobsworth (and often wrong) and I believe there were complaints via NRA from other clubs and individuals who had experienced his zealotry. As PLO for my club I had a number of dealings with him both for the club as a whole and on behalf of a couple of our members. I had to be really quite firm in resisting his "initiatives" but these are a matter for a separate thread. He is gone now so we did not maintain the explosive store registration.