Musket balls and pistol balls!! Help!!

[roaljodaka]

Hi all, i have recently had a permission on a local field at last after many talks with the farmer, anyway i found a hammered coin from 1649 commonwealth of england half groat i was told on this site, anyway my question is i have now found about 25 musket balls and 20 pistol balls all close to the surface!!, why am i not finding anything else like coins???, thought i would have found a few more hammered coins especially with all these muskets balls coming out the ground!!. Its like a trash infested area with musketballs and not iron lol.
Any info would be great.

[Val Beechey]

Had you wondered if it was a Battle site.  That many musket balls could be of interest to some.


Val

p.s. time to worry is when you start digging up the bodies.

[legio11augustus]

what detector are using,and what discrim settings .,maybe less discrimination ,and be prepared to dig a bit of iron ,and find those masked signals

[roaljodaka]

Had you wondered if it was a Battle site.  That many musket balls could be of interest to some.


Val

p.s. time to worry is when you start digging up the bodies.

hi val, it is near to a big stone building on a hill top.

[roaljodaka]

what detector are using,and what discrim settings .,maybe less discrimination ,and be prepared to dig a bit of iron ,and find those masked signals

Hi legio11augustus it is a whites xlt but the trouble is them balls have a nice reading for digging up plus it is only a bit higher signal than the hammered coin that came out.

[legio11augustus]

are the musket balls mis-shaped? as in fired , or in unfired state,that should answer the question

[legio11augustus]

hmm, i wouldnt give up on the hammies,you just might of been unlucky ...the next time your there you might bag one,beings youve found one in that area

[Dale]

Hi all, i have recently had a permission on a local field at last after many talks with the farmer, anyway i found a hammered coin from 1649 commonwealth of england half groat i was told on this site, anyway my question is i have now found about 25 musket balls and 20 pistol balls all close to the surface!!, why am i not finding anything else like coins???, thought i would have found a few more hammered coins especially with all these muskets balls coming out the ground!!. Its like a trash infested area with musketballs and not iron lol.
Any info would be great.

Try the next field over, don't forget the balls may have been fired there, (Target area) the coins are losses the balls are shot.... or its possibly just a 1 night camp area for the musket gunners?
A castle near me got took in the civil war, and a field 1mile away we find loads of muskets + 1 Charles halfgroat I was also hoping for a Newark siege piece!!!!!!

[Dale]

are the musket balls mis-shaped? as in fired , or in unfired state,that should answer the question

Yep sure would

[roaljodaka]

are the musket balls mis-shaped? as in fired , or in unfired state,that should answer the question

No the balls are in great shape, just the odd one or two that have a little scuff in them but definately not hit anything hard!!.

[roaljodaka]

Oh BTW, there is 3 fields producing these balls!! so maybe a camp as in 1/2 mile from big stone building on hilltop

[b.buoy]

It is possible they have been dropped before firing. We had an area by me which produced similar and the experts decided it was a training range a couple of hundred years ago.
That site was on the side of a hill also.

[galoshers]

round lead balls can be from the early 1800s as well

Process

In a shot tower, lead is heated until molten, then dropped through a copper sieve high in the tower. The liquid lead forms tiny spherical balls by surface tension, then solidifies as it falls. The partially cooled balls are caught at the floor of the tower in a water-filled basin.[1] The now fully cooled balls are checked for roundness and sorted by size; those that are "out of round" are remelted. A slightly inclined table is used for checking roundness.[2] To make larger shot sizes, a copper sieve with larger holes is used. However, the maximum size is limited by the height of the tower, because larger shot sizes must fall farther to cool. A polishing with a slight amount of graphite is necessary for lubrication and to prevent oxidation.
History

The process was invented by William Watts of Bristol, UK, and patented in 1782.[1][3] The same year, Watts extended his house in Redcliffe, Bristol to build the first shot tower.[4] Shot towers replaced the earlier techniques of casting shot in moulds, which was expensive, or of dripping molten lead into water barrels, which produced insufficiently spherical balls. Large shot which could not be made by the shot tower were made by tumbling pieces of cut lead sheet in a barrel until round.[5]

The "wind tower" method, patented in 1848 by the T.O LeRoy Company of New York City, which used a blast of cold air to dramatically shorten the drop necessary[6][7] meant that tall shot towers became unnecessary, but many were still constructed into the late 1880s, and two surviving examples date from 1916 and 1969. Since the 1960s the Bliemeister method is used to make smaller shot sizes, and larger sizes are made by the cold swaging process of feeding calibrated lengths of wire into hemispherical dies and stamping them into spheres.[8]