✅ SOLVED need id help, possible musket ball.

[oldsmith]

Hello fellow tnet folks, I found these 2 items detecting an old trail with lots of fur trade history. They rang around 50 on my at gold and they were about 4" down right beside each other. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks for looking and hh. The item in the left weighs 3.77 grams and the item in the right weighs 12.36 grams

 

Amazon Forum Fav 👍

Family Maps of Hinds County, Mississippi, Deluxe Edition - Grab it through Amazon!

[CSA2K]

lead?

 

[d2]

Looks like melted aluminum to me...d2

 

[oldsmith]

Thanks for the replies I think it's lead, I know it's not melted alluminum due to it's weight. Could it be a failed attempt to mold a musket ball ? I don't know anything about the process.

 

[Charlie P. (NY)]

More like the dross skilled off the pot than a failed attempt at a cast ball. If you missed a nice round ball by that much there was no hope for you.

 

[oldsmith]

Thanks Charlie , not sure what you mean. Please educate me.

 

[Charlie P. (NY)]

When you melt lead there is crud that floats to the top of the pot. And sand and rocks will float on molten lead. Molten lead is fluxed with something like beeswax added to the melt and stirred in to raise the impurities. The dross is what is skimmed off the top of the pot before the pour.

I cast my own lead balls for muzzleloading but also worked at an iron and bronze foundry in the 1980's and the process is similar whether one pound or lead or 10,000 pounds of iron. Heat, flux, skim, pour.

 

[oldsmith]

Thanks again Charlie. I think you nailed it. I didn't have a chance to grid search the immediate area because my dog took off and I'm in bear country. Tell me have you seen dross that looks similar on the outside but is shiny and glass like when you break it open? I have found that sort of thing also in the same area.

 

[Charlie P. (NY)]

Looks like this:






Anything that weighs less than the lead floats to the surface and is skimmed off. When fresh it can be nasty stuff as lead oxide and other impurities form some bad compounds - particularly prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide) if you get the dross wet. If it's been laying around or buried for decades it's leeched out. Lead that hasn't been exposed to air is very shiny, so if you snap apart dross it shows the lead that invariably gets included.

Another alternative is you have drippings from where a lot of soldering took place. I have found globs of solder around old construction (plumber's lead and tin) that the detector just goes bonkers for.

And there's also something called "babbit metal", an alloy of tin, that looks like lead and was used for bearings in trains, farm and heavy equipment that was cast in place.

 

[oldsmith]

Excellent info Charlie, thanks for sharing your knowledge I will mark this thread solved.