[Limpet Chicken]

Nitric acid can be made by replacing the nitrate group on a salt with another strong acid, so I was wondering, is it possible to do the same with nitrocellulose, either the smokeless powder, or maybe in lesser yield from less nitrated forms such as old camera film or nitrocellulose plastic? or does the cellulose bind too strongly to HNO3 to allow replacement with another acid?

[Corvettaholic]

Now this is the stuff that I really get interested in! I never knew about extracting a type of acid from a salt, does that work with any kind of salt that contains the contents of an acid? But since I guess you can pull nitric acid out of a salt, I don't see why you couldn't pull it out of anything else providing the group is still intact?

Also, wouldn't it be cheaper (and easier, and safer) to buy nitric acid as opposed to making it?

[Limpet Chicken]

Cheaper, probably, safer-probably not, and easier??? not rea;;y as I do not have a credit card, nor the job to support one, but I would be carefull about ordering it as people might suspect about what I am going to do with various nitrated products what with me being an amateur and everything.

I just wondered this, because a while ago, one of my guns broke and I have a fair amount of ammunition i can no longer fire

[hmx9123]

Sorry, I'm going to stop this before it gets to the point where it needs to be censored.  Nitric acid is the principal acid used in making explosives and as such it's probably not a good idea for anyone to get into the details of making it on our newsgroup.  However, to answer your question, nitrocellulose has a very different structure than nitrate salts; the nitrate group is bound by a covalent rather than ionic bond, so you can't use the same methods to make nitric acid.  There are some ways of chemically liberating the nitro group for use in other reactions, but they use a lot of exotic laboratory chemicals.