From what I remember the nitroglycerin was held in a fine sawdust matrix and it would sweat thru the heavy paper on the sticks. Since there was dynawipe in the boxes you likely never had beads of nitro form on the outside of the sticks. When carried in a backpack they would sweat into the pack fabric and then straight into your bloodstream.
I suspect that it would be pure nitroglycerin because I heard from friends that after cutting a stick you could scrape small balls of the goo from your brass powder knife and whack them hard with a ball-peen hammer and they would pop.
We used those small paper-wrapped sticks when we drilled mini-hole programs where the shot-holes were 5' (1.5m) deep or less and could be drilled by one man or a two man crew using jackhammers or Little Beaver type augers depending on near surface conditions. For traditional shot-holes that were 80-100' deep (24.4-30.5m) or more we used 5# (2.27 kg) sticks of dynagel (seismogel?) which was a gelled nitroglycerin that could stand long periods of immersion without degrading. These sticks were plastic tubes that could be screwed together to make a charge of any size and the loader could place sets of empty tubes to space charges inside the shot-hole allowing multiple shots to be taken from a single shot-hole. The blasting caps would be inserted at the top of each charge and the loader would label them from deepest to shallowest so that the shooter, who might not get around for a month or more, could fire them from deepest to shallowest allowing the data from each shot in that shot-hole to be stacked for signal-to-noise improvement.
From what I remember the nitroglycerin was held in a fine sawdust matrix and it would sweat thru the heavy paper on the sticks. Since there was dynawipe in the boxes you likely never had beads of nitro form on the outside of the sticks. When carried in a backpack they would sweat into the pack fabric and then straight into your bloodstream.
I suspect that it would be pure nitroglycerin because I heard from friends that after cutting a stick you could scrape small balls of the goo from your brass powder knife and whack them hard with a ball-peen hammer and they would pop.
We used those small paper-wrapped sticks when we drilled mini-hole programs where the shot-holes were 5' (1.5m) deep or less and could be drilled by one man or a two man crew using jackhammers or Little Beaver type augers depending on near surface conditions. For traditional shot-holes that were 80-100' deep (24.4-30.5m) or more we used 5# (2.27 kg) sticks of dynagel (seismogel?) which was a gelled nitroglycerin that could stand long periods of immersion without degrading. These sticks were plastic tubes that could be screwed together to make a charge of any size and the loader could place sets of empty tubes to space charges inside the shot-hole allowing multiple shots to be taken from a single shot-hole. The blasting caps would be inserted at the top of each charge and the loader would label them from deepest to shallowest so that the shooter, who might not get around for a month or more, could fire them from deepest to shallowest allowing the data from each shot in that shot-hole to be stacked for signal-to-noise improvement.