VOL1266-X wrote:
> Help Cannonball guy.
As I've mentioned elsewhere, there are quite literally milions of metal balls which were not manufactured as artillery ammunition. In actual fact, Civilian-usage metal balls vastly outnumber all the cannonballs ever manufactured in human history. Some example categories are ball bearings, Mining-&-Stonemilling Industry rock-crusher balls, Sports Shot-Put balls, counterweights, and Ornamental Ironwork balls (such as gatepost-tops).
The way we cannonball collectors can disinguish an Artillery ball from a Civilian-use ball is by very precisely measuring the ball's diameter and weight. If the diameter and weight don't match up with any of the various sizes of historical cannonballs, the ball is not a cannonball. Putting that in simple terms: there has never been any such thing as a .47-caliber bullet... so, no matter how much a lead slug may look like a bullet, if it measures .47-caliber it is not a bullet.
If you want to learn more about the precise sizes and weights of Civil War, War Of 1812, and Revolutionary War cannonballs and grapeshot, go to:
www.civilwarartillery.com/shottables.htm
By the way, note how super-precise the Artillery Ordnance Department's specifications for cannonball ball-sizes are. That is because a cannonball absolutely MUST fit the cannon's bore precisely right. Part of an Artillery Ordnance Inspector's job was to very carefully measure the size of EVERY cannonball, to make absolutely certain that each one was in exact compliance with the Ordnance Department's strict size-specifications.
The ditchdigger's 30-pounds-or-so ball (with iron ring) is very-very unlikely to be a cannonball. For 100% proof that it is not a cannonball, you'd need to clean the rust-crust off it and measure its diameter and weight extremely precisely, using calipers and a Postal Shipping scale (because common household bathroom-scales are not accurate enough).
There are several types of iron (or steel) balls which have an embedded ring:
counterweight ball
gate-weight
Colonial-era Chain Shot
Sports Hammer-Throw ball
No artillery "Chain-Shot" balls weighed approximately 30 pounds, so we can exclude that ID for this ball. Also, no Hammer-Throw balls weigh approximately 30 pounds.
The ditchdigger's ball is most probably either a counterweight, or an unusually large gate-weight, or (based on Nova Treaure's statement) a prisoner-ball.
Edit: Rasputin posted his gate-weight idea while I was typing this long reply. I'm glad to see that somebody else here in the What-Is-It forum knows about the existence of gate-weights. ;-)
Also, I mis-typed the URL for the cannonball size-info. I've corrected the URL.