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I found this in a box lot at an estate sale today. The salt shaker is for scale. The round is approximately 3 inches tall and 1 inch wide and very heavy. Any ideas?
Might be an old Gattling Gun Cartridge of 100 Calibre.
Is it Centerfire, or Rimfire?
Does it have any lettering on the Cartridge Head?
Is it a Lead Bullet? And if so, and being it is a Rimmed Cartridge, it likely is well before WWI - or before the Hauge Convention of the latter 1890s - as for having been anything Military anyway.
More pictures with a more standard scaling device (I use an assortment of change and a ruler, generally)
Are there any markings? What priming system does it use?
There are a bunch of things it COULD be, but to make a positive ID would take more info; headstamp, ignition system, the measurements at the rim, head, neck, and overall length, and so on. A picture of the base with a ruler to show scale would be a good start.
Could it possibly be 8 ga.? If so it might be for a klinker gun where they shot slag down in larger industrial boilers. In more modern times they belted the brass on plastic hulls to preclude interchanging these into old commercial guns. To my knowledge 8 ga. has been the standard throughout this practice.
1. Check the projectile with a magnet to see if it is steel or brass.
2. Check for a seam indicating a screw-on nose cap.
If it is steel, and there is a nose cap seam, it is probably filled with TNT.
Early armor piercing shells did not have a point detonating fuse. They relied on contact detonation.
They just went off from impact heat when hitting steel plate.
rcmodel- The projectile IS steel, checked it with a magnet. Approximately 1/4 inch down the nose is a faint line all the way around. Doesn't LOOK like it would screw off but I'm not messing with it. What the heck is this thing! And what was it fired out of?
Whatever it is, I would treat it as a HE projectile if you can see a nose cap joint.
There could also be a base detonating fuse / filler plug on the bottom of it you can't see without pulling the projectile out of the case.
Whatever it is, you need to decide whether or not it is worth the risk of having it laying around the house. Might be a good candidate for a one-way trip to a deep lake or river near you!
PS: The other curious thing I noticed is, for a steel projectile, it doesn't have a bronze driving band to engage the rifling in a rifled barrel.
waidmann in post #14 suggested it might be an 8ga "clinker" round used in foundry's to knock slag of the insides of blast furnaces. That is another possibility, as it apparently was designed to fire in a smooth-bore barrel, and Gatling guns had rifled barrels.
If it is a "clinker" round it would not have an HE projictile.
I have several cannon shells from WWI. One has an explosive tip that is a left hand thread. Underneath it's hollowed out for more explosives. Something my Grandfather brought back from France a long time ago.
Got a LITTLE closer to figuring out what this thing is. Showed it to some guys at the local VFW and they said it looked like a round from possibly a Vickers type small gun that was used to "clear" the trenches and pillboxes. The micrometer readings are as follows:
bullet dia.- 23mm, rim dia.- 28mm, cartridge length- 63mm. steel round. Most Vickers guns fired a 1.57 round one at a time like a single shot shotgun. This ones just a little smaller. Still not sure if it is HE, incendiary,or solid.
In case you get nervous about it, call and make an appointment with local LE. I was tearing down an old house and found what looked like a live WWII type fragmentation grenade. After admiring it for a few days and thinking something stupid like pulling the pin and chunking it, I called my local Sheriff. It would have been my luck the fuse would have deteriorated to 0.5 seconds. After meeting with me and looking at it he wouldn't get close to my truck. I had to meet him at a big construction site where a neighboring city that was big enough had a bomb squad. They hauled it away in a trailer with a big steel cylindrical shaped contained standing on end that looked like a mortar. I was told they blew it up at an appropriate place. No matter what you do with it, if it isn't disposed of properly someone might find it find it and get hurt.
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