Can anyone please help me identify this casing? It is all copper, the bottom of it says 7.5 and 60.
Which I'm assuming 60 is the grain. I found it at an old pig farm that dated back to the 1930's. it's larger than a .233 and is about 2" long.
Thank you in advance
Ron
7.5 should be the diameter of the bullet, 60mm would be the length of the casing. Similar to a 7.62X54mm. 7.62 is the measurement, sort of like .223 would be for an AR-15 or similar, 54 would be the length of the casing for the breech size. Hope that helps.
Most foreign headstamps related to the date of manufacture rather than the size of the case. It looks like a rimmed case. I would take a caliper to it and get som accurate measurements, it could very well be a Mosin Nagant 7.62 x 54R.
Being that the case is 2" and rimmed narrows it down fairly easily. Here are the dimensions for a 7.62x54R cartridge. This is an extremely common military surplus round with production starting in the late 1800's and continuing up to this day. The bolt action rifle associated with this round is the Mosin Nagant, produced in Russia and later by other Soviet block countries. These surplus rifles were produced by the millions and can be found at any gun show today in "surplus" condition for less than $100 bucks sometimes.
The headstamp markings indicate factory and year manufactured...99% of the time. The "60" indicates that it was manufactured at the Russian State Factory in Frunze, Kirgisia, Russia. They stopped manufacturing this round at that factory in 1991, which is fairly late. The 75 would indicate the year of production, which would make perfect sense. Are you sure it's not a "75" and not a "7.5"? See below for some example headstamps from this factory.
Actually, copper washed steel. Brass was way to expensive and hard to come by to use it for military grade ammo in the Eastern Bloc countries. To this day they still use laquered steel cases.
Should attract a magnet. Also, most of the headstamps have little imperfections of one sort or another, so if there's a dot between the 7 and 5, may be an imperfection during striking(click on the headstamp photo to blow it up and you'll see what I mean). Hhmm...I'm still sticking with nagant round...unless the dimensions are way off.
Oh, in case anyone would like a little future reference material, here's the IAA Code chart -