Fired musket ball?

[Ninjafossils]

Found this disk of lead at my colonial site. Defenently a fired projectile as the bottle shows the direction it hit the hard object. There is also a crater where the nose may have been, or possible the center of where the bullet it. Is there any way to tell if it is a musket ball, a civil war bullet, or a modern bullet?

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

Upgraded Night Vision Monocular Digital Infrared Monocular Telescope for 100% Darkness with 8X Zoom - Grab it through Amazon!

[Beeps in my sleep]

Looks to me like a splattered musket ball. Can you weight it? I have found plenty of Civil war Musket balls some splattered. If it felt heavy and set the pin pointer off I would scrape the end with a blade and if lead showed I knew I had a splatterball. Also A musket ball wouldn't have a nose. The only flat on a properly casted musket ball is a sprue which was filed off. It was a stem basically from being molded and then filed off.

 

[BosnMate]

I've shot muzzle loading rifles for years, and your flattened ball looks to me like it hit wood, in the second photo you can kind of see the grain on the lead. I've recovered lead rifle balls from wood that look just like your find. In picture 4 and 5 you can also see where the spru was cut off the the ball after it was cast. My swag on your find is it's a rifle ball. Weigh it in grains and you should be able to come up with the caliber it was before being fired and flattened. In other words, if your lead weighs close to 180 grains, then it would most likely be a .50 caliber bullet. I'll try and post some photos later to show you what I mean.

 

[BosnMate]

A year ago I posted on the same subject, and here are some pictures and quotes from that post.
When casting lead balls a person will pour a bunch before cutting the sprue off. This is because the fresh cast ball is plenty hot, and the mold also gets plenty hot, so you make up a bunch of balls, let them and the mold cool down and then cut the sprue.

In the photo, the ball mold would be a type used from the 1700's until today. I probably have more than one myself, among the various sizes of bullet molds I use. In the photo the balls between the handles still have the sprue on them, and the ones to the right have been cut using the cutter located on the mold.

This is a different style bullet mold, this one dates to the civil war, but this type mold for round balls in all sizes is still made today. This one happens to be a colt pistol mold and casts a conical bullet and a round ball in the same mold. What we are interested in is the sprue cutter. On this one the lead is poured in through the holes, when the melted lead sets up, which doesn't take long, then the plate on the top is tapped sideways, cutting the sprue off and leaving a flat place on the ball, where the previous mold in the other post leaves a pinched cut. So your find was cast in a mold with an attached spru cutter, which could date it later. Unless your find is in context with other finds from a certain era, it would be impossible to date, because lots of people still shoot round ball muzzleloaders.
This is a modern Lee round ball mold sold today.