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12 pound cannon ball?


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Cannon balls are not my thing, but what the heck no guts no glory. This is a swap meet find. I do not have a caliper or a real scale. I put it next to a Hotchkiss I found at a yard sale for scale and to compare patina and pitting. My bathroom scale puts it at 12 pounds and it has a rough diameter of 4 and 7/8ths. Along the seam is a hole for the mold that is about 1" and 15/16ths across and off to one side of that hole at about 3 o'clock is another area that looks kind of like another hole that has been worked over. This area is not on the seam. What do you think?

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I took a cloth sewing tape and ran it around the mold mark. I then transfered that to a film positive I used back in the day when I worked in a graphics shop. The film strip meassures in inches, picas, points, cm and mm. It is very accurate. I came up with a circumference of 15.50". If any of you math wiz kids knows how to calculate a diameter from a circumference that would help.

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Math isn't my friend. ;)

 

There were a few topics on conversion and just picked one at random.

That eliminates it being a US Civil War round, could be Euro, but that is way outside my area.

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I just read that 18th century British 12 pound cannon balls are about 5 inch's in diameter, have rough mold marks and a large vent hole like the one pictured.

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This diagram shows how a cannon ball is made. The web site I borrowed this from dives deeper into what could be a cannon ball and what is not a cannon ball. So far this ball meets the things one looks for. The diameter is the only hang up.

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