Cannonball fragment, need help with ID

[Icewing]

Yesterday I got to make a last ditch effort to hunt the place where I found the 2 pieces of 12 pound case shot last fall. The earth movers are on site scraping up all of the top soil to build a new apartment complex (very saddening). Anyway the construction crew couldn't give me written permission but directed me to where there was no fence and told me when they were going home with a big wink wink...

I hunted one of their big piles and found a couple of lead round balls consistent with 12 pound case, then went back as close as I could get to where I found the pieces last fall, and hunted where the dozens had been pushing dirt but hadn't completely removed it. There I found another round ball, a .69 caliber minnie with a little pointy nipple at the tip, and another piece of cannonball.

I took it home and cleaned it up and tried to see if it would match up and fit to the other pieces I have, thinking it might be from the same ball. That's when I noticed one end is thicker than the other, which leads me to believe it's a different type of ball.

One end measures .47 inches the other end measures. 57 (+/- .01 due to rust)

 

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[relic nut]

Nicely done! Glad you can save a few more.

 

[devldog]

Nice saves before all were lost. So sad to lose some of these hunting grounds and Historical land to what developers call progress. Still, you did good.

 

[callicles]

Nice! The fragment looks to be from a spherical case-shot projectile because the walls are not so thick. It is either a 6-pounder or 12-pounder frag. The Cannonball Guy has not been active lately, but I know he could tell you beyond a shadow of doubt. Maybe he will check in and give us his expert opinion.

 

[TheCannonballGuy]

I've had some health issues, but am now at least "somewhat" improved, so I'm slowly returning to posting regularly. Not quite there yet.

Also, ever since my computer's hard-drive died and got replaced, I'm having trouble accessing Private Messages.

Thank you for doing the effort of providing very precise measurement of your cannonball fragment's wall-thickness, using a caliper. The measurement, graduating from about .45 to .55-inch, tells me two things. First, the frag is from a civil war era exploded 12-Pounder (4.62-inch) Case-Shot shell, meaning, it contained about 80 antipersonnel balls/slugs along with its internal gunpowder bursting charge. Second, its powder-cavity was unintentionally cast off-center inside the ball. That causes the shellwall to be thicker on one side of the ball than the opposite side. See the photo below, showing a sawed-in-half explosive cannonball with a miss-cast off-center powder cavity. Notice the difference between the wall thickness at the bottom of the ball versus the thickness two-thirds of the way up the ball's sides.

Being accidentally cast with the cavity off-center tends to mean it is Confederate-made, but I've seen some yankee-made ones with the same casting error. (For example, the one in the photo below is a yankee-made one.) So I cannot say for certain that your frag is from a CS-made cannonball, just that it is "more likely" a CS-made one.

 

[Icewing]

Thank you very much for the info, and I hope you make a full recovery and get back to your old self soon.

 

[TheCannonballGuy]

You're welcome.

I forgot to mention, about your large-caliber 3-groove Minie-bullet with what you called "a little pointy nipple at the tip." That appears to be a casting-mold sprue which did not get entirely snipped off. It means your bullet is what bullet-collectors call a "nose-cast" Minie... and those are mostly Confederate-made.

I said "large-caliber" because it might be a .70 or .71 or .72-caliber. Put you caliper on it, measure its diameter, turn it a bit, and measure it again, at least three times (because sometimes the bullet's base can be somewhat out-of-round). Then please post the measurements.

An excavated .69-caliber Minie's diameter generally measures somewhere between .670 and .685-inch. (Patina usually adds about .01 to .02-inch to the bullet's original "non-dug" diameter.)

 

[sutphin]

NICE FINDS