Musket balls

[ro401]

Found these on a cattle farm in West Kingston RI. The farm is next to Great Swamp where the battle of Great Swamp was fought. The picture with the two lead balls, the large one weighs .74 oz and looks just shy of 3/4 inch. The small one looks just over 1/2 inch and the weight is way off because of a large nick on the backside. The second picture is a bit smaller than the small lead ball but is copper. I had all three shot with a X-ray gun to make sure of what they are made of. I can see a sprue on the copper one also. Any ideas of age or caliber would be great. I'm still pretty new to detecting and have found it a little difficult to research these online.

 

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[coinman123]

It looks like the two on the left are musketballs. Congrats on the find, I'm sure you will find more, in my experiance, when there are some there are many more. Not sure about the copper one, maybe a bearing?

Musketballs could date pretty far back, the problem is, in general musket balls are hard to date. They could be 300 years old or 150, no way to precisely tell when they are from.

 

[ro401]

I was thinking the same thing about the copper one but it's not perfectly round. Kind of rough like the musket balls . The sprue also threw me off. Thanks for the help!

 

[coinman123]

I was thinking the same thing about the copper one but it's not perfectly round. Kind of rough like the musket balls . The sprue also threw me off. Thanks for the help!

I am not an expert but I heard rumours that in war people have used what ever metal they own to make musketballs. Not saying that is what it is, I'm just in saying that I have heard that this kind of thing happened. Are you sure that it is copper?

Sent from my phone

 

[BosnMate]

How accurate is your scale? A British Brown Bess musket bore was .75 caliber, and it fired balls that weighed 12 balls to the pound. The paper cartridge for the Bess contained a ball of .69 caliber, way under size because because of powder fouling, and the fact that the paper cartridge was torn open, powder poured down the barrel, and the ball was rammed leaving all the paper from the cartridge, the ball had to be way undersized. .75 caliber means 3/4 of an inch, and .50 caliber means 1/2 inch. Calibers are 1/100 or even 1/1000 of an inch. The bullet should be weighed in grains for accuracy. Your measurements are in the ball park for a Brown Bess musket ball. .74 X 16 = 11.84 balls to the pound. Close enough for a pretty good guess, but not exact which requires exact weight and measurements in inch and grains. I have no idea what the copper ball would be, but I'd be willing to bet it has nothing to do with firearms. .50 caliber could be a rifle ball, they were fired with a greased patch on the ball, so there would probably be no rifling marks on the ball. Muskets were smooth bore, rifles had riflings in the barrel. Again, a .50 caliber rifle ball would be undersized by as much as 5/1000 of an inch, so the ball should mike out to .495 or so. That is unless it's been deformed from being fired. Anyhow, you are close enough for an educated guess, and I'd say yes, they are bullets from a muzzle loader. Dating them is another story. Patina helps, other stuff found in the area also helps. But I've shot and hunted with muzzle loaders up until just a couple of years ago, and I shot a replica Brown Bess and original rifles in in the same caliber of both your finds.

 

[ro401]

A bunch of Spanish silver coins were found in the same field. The oldest one was 1715.

 

[ro401]

I don't have pictures of the coins because unfortunately I wasn't the one to find them