Resawing sycamore I hit something hidden in the stock, turned out to be a lead ball between 1/2 and 3/4 dia. went back out to the waste I had cut off and very unscientifically counted/estimated the growth rings at 172 for the tree and the ball was about 20- 30 rings out from the center. I hated to loose a band but is an interesting thought wondering about that ball and it's origin, circa 1850's in what would have been a very wild SW Wisconsin territory.
EJ
My brother bought a tree from Dover Tenn. area that had stood at the edge of a civil war battle site, after having it sawn into boards, one 10' board had
Kind'a cool, putting hands on real history like that. Had a similar experience when I got lucky enough to do some travelling in Europe. Found it thrilling to touch / see things hundreds of years old.
My dad use to run a door shop and had uncovered a lead ball in some red oak when planing. It does set the mind to wondering doesn't it? Target practice, a missed shot intended to bring home food, exchange between enemies?? Never know....
"mel" wrote in news:n5WNb.8887$ snipped-for-privacy@newssvr23.news.prodigy.com:
This may be apocryphal, but I've heard of bottles being found in wood. Seems some guy put his bottle in a tree crotch, time passes, and voila! a blade-killer.
Interesting find. But your math may be misleading. Penetration upon impact would have played a big part, probably making it not as long ago as you think.
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good point, but there might be some distress in the wood that had been punched through and then none at all, revealing a better guestimation of when it happened.
Party Pooper!
Oh I know like I said pretty wild ass on the guess part. I'm not much of a gun guy so I don't even really know when cap and ball guns went by the way side. I can tell you as the tape measures it was about 22" deep. and about
8' out from the center. As the Sycamore grows thats got some time behind it.EJ
I love stories like that. I sure hope you can use the "hole" in the wood and perhaps the ball itself in a piece.
Good luck Rob
That's pretty cool!
I can't top that at all. Closest I've come is unrelated to woodworking. While digging in one of Mom's flower beds, I found a Minié ball that looks like it had never been fired. Just no telling what the story is. Anything from some Civil War solider dropped it in the heat of battle to somebody bought it at a gift shop in 1973 and dropped it.
It's still sort of cool no matter what. It's white, and I think it had definitely been in the ground since the century before last, no matter how it got there.
Somewhere on the web is a photo of a tree with a bicycle embedded in it. Stuff like that happens all the time.
They do show up. A friend of mine and I were cutting rounds for turning bowls out of, I believe, a maple tree trunk a bit ago. I was bracing it, and was interested to see what looked like curls of metal showing up on the surface. When the piece fell away, indeed, there was a nice, round dot of lead in the wood. It was a bit newer stock, though. The good news is that it is pretty unlikely the blade is damaged...although it is possible that there was something hard enough in the shot to require that it be re-sharpened. If you have a Dremel or some other rotary tool, it would only take half an hour or so... Regards Dave Mundt
Dunno _what_ vague memories I'm dredging this up from, but I seem to recall that there was a buffalo gun (Sharps, maybe??) that used a .58 cal round.
Some big 'elephant guns' used rounds that were well over 1" dia.
Actually, Wisconsin became a state in 1848.
On a dig in BWCA (Boundary Water Canoe Area) we were told how a musket belonging to voyageurs had been found nearly 20' up a tree. Apparently it was hung on a branch and forgotten. The rifle went upward with the tree.
Guess it pays to look up once in a while.
Must have had a poorly educated guide. Branches down rise as the tree grows. A rifle hung on a branch 6 feet above the ground would still be about 6 feet above the ground however old the tree grows. Your guide could have made it much more dramatic by saying the guy climbed the tree and went to sleep and fell out and died.
I was sawing down a pine tree one time for a lady, and hit 'something' that ruined the chain blade... turned out it was a pop bottle that someone had dropped into the hollow center some years back... the glass was fine, but the blade was beyond hope...it turned out to be about a 1950's vintage bottle... --Shiva--
Civil War rifle were often .68 cal. I know Sharps made a .50 cal. gun, and the Penn. and Ky. long rifles were .45 and .50 cal. weapons. Anything above .50 cal. seemed to shoot a miniball or "bullet" shaped round rather then a ball as a normal load, I have seen a ton of round balls for the .68 cal weapons though that were dug up at battle grounds.
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