Confusing possible musket ball

[clf_02]

My buddy who just started dectecting not to long ago brings me this object shaped like a round ball. I look at it and say its a rock. He puts the pro pointer on it and it goes off. I drop it on a concrete floor it does not dent the object or anything and makes a noise like a rock. We take a knife and scratch it on one side and get and knock the outer layer off in a spot to find that it's lead. So it looks like a lead ball either covered in some hard material that looks and feel like a rock. I am really puzzled. One of the pics you can see where I scratched the object to expose the lead.

 

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[gunsil]

You have no size indicator in you photo. It looks like a fired round ball that has hit something. The whitish covering is lead oxide which forms on lead with age and eventually seals the lead from future corrosion. The oxide is white, but then can become stained by other minerals in the soil. This oxide forms at different rates in different soil and is not useful in dating such finds. A 75 year old ball will exhibit the same coating as a 200 year old ball in most soil conditions. Musket ball usually implies military use, but round balls came in a huge variety of sizes and were also used in rifles, both smoothbore and rifled, shotguns, and pistols. Some were also used in case shot, a cannon projectile which exploded sending lead balls all around. Since yours is a bit flattened by impact it will be hard to get an exact measurement or positive ID of it's usage.

 

[clf_02]

I have a lot of lead bullets this is not the the oxide. It's a brown color and very hard.

 

[clf_02]

I will put my calipers on it this afternoon for size. But I'm not so much concerned with the ID of the ball as I am the Brown very hard layer on it. I will also take a pic of it with another bullet that is white and normal oxiding later today.

 

[BosnMate]

It is lead oxide, just from different soil conditions, what gunsil says is all true, but I've found a few lead balls with the same sort
of heavy, hard oxide on them. Mine were found in desert conditions in Nevada, and Oregon -- and if I remember right, Idaho, and
I don't know if those weather conditions are what made the difference or not. I'd assume it would have more to do with the mineral
content of the soil than anything else, which would make a difference regarding the oxide. They were found in areas where they
probably had been for over 100 years at the time of the find, which would have been 1960'ish.

 

[clf_02]

This was found in Mussissippi.

 

[clf_02]

And everything else around it came up normal and white

 

[clf_02]

Idk

 

[TheCannonballGuy]

Clf_02 asked me to comment. (I've been busy dealing with preparations for the blizzard, and then shoveling snow.)

Before talking about the cause of the heavy encrustation, let's deal with figuring out what your "lead ball" was used for. As others have suggested, I too believe it is a fired musketball or pistolball, which got "smushed" out-of-round by impact with the ground or a tree. It could also be a Case-Shot ball from an antipersonnel artillery shell -- but since you haven't reported finding artillery shell fragments at that spot, that would tend to exclude it from being a Case-Shot ball.

Firing and impact can change the shape of a bullet or musket/pistol ball... but its weight doesn't get changed. So, its weight can be a useful ID-clue. Please get that "lead ball" weighed on a Jeweler's scale, which weighs in grams or grains. Then we can "do the math" to calculate the ball's original diameter.

At first, I thought the cause of the heavy encrustation was soil-chemistry. Thank you for adding the information that other lead objects from that spot come out of the ground without the thick encrustation. That fact indicates that the answer is the chemistry of the "lead" ball itself. It is probably not pure-lead (100% lead), but instead is a lead-alloy. It MIGHT be a pre-civil-war homemade ball... made from tossing pieces of whatever various White-Metals were handy into the melting-pot. If it is a homemade musketball, it could be a "polyglot" mixture of some lead with pewter and/or tin and/or zinc and/or solder, and/or gosh knows what else. I think that is what is responsible for the thick encrustation forming on it but not on the pure-lead balls and bullets dug nearby.

 

[clf_02]

244 gn

 

[clf_02]

This home site according to the owners date back to the 1780's

 

[clf_02]

With the calipers I get .58" one way and .46" the other as it seems shot. Just doing the math I would say that puts it around prob .52" original diameter.

 

[clf_02]

Just a ballpark figure

 

[TheCannonballGuy]

The closest match-up among musketballs for your 244 grains ball is a .54-caiber musketball, whose actual diameter is about .53-inch, and is reported (in the T&T book) to weigh 221 grains. Your ball might have about 20 grains worth of encrustation on it. According to the McKee-&-Mason book, .54-caliber lead balls were used in Hall Rifles, Jenks Carbines, and Mississippi Rifles.