Hi there,
I am new to this interesting forum.

I am posting here a pic of 2 types pf bullets from the Italian battlefields of solferino (1859) and Custoza (1866). The brownish ones on the left coming from solferino whereas the other 2, darker in colour, being dug in custoza.
Within the 2 types, the ball remains the same, at the top the Austrian Lorenz 1854 pattern ball, the other one a French Minié (1853 and 1863 pattern I believe).
Now, can anyone explain the difference in colour? both are made of lead, however I suspect that in the 2 balls on the right hand side the concentration of antimony must be higher. In fact I guess that in the years between those two major battles, the moulding of projectiles must have seen some changes such as an increase in the amount of antimony used in order to achieve a harder consistency, hence the darker colour.

have I got it right or all wrong??

please le me hear from you,
regards
tesoro

I suspect the soil they were in played a roll in color more than alloy. Minnie's did best when cast of pure soft lead as when made this way with a hollow base they could expand and fit bore when powder was ignited.

hi,
actually all balls where found in small forests with the same soil, same tree type etc that's why I was thinking about the antimony.

Welcome to the forum tesoro. Rules are simple, be nice and join in.

54 probably gave you as good an answer as I could and I sure agree with him. Different minerals in different soils can have quite an effect on metals. Lead seems to last a long time when buried.

Basically lead is best for minnies when you can scratch/mark it with your finger nail easily. After being buried for a long time they would tend to react with soil and change color or hardness too. Also notice that the slugs that you suspect are harder, are more deformed too which suggests that they impacted a harder rockier ground while the other ones hit softer ground and were not deformed further supporting the different soil theory.

I believe many of the Minie balls made at US arsenels were swaged, not cast. Swaging works best with very soft lead- usually lead without antimony, or with very little of it.
For high volume production of bullets, like a government arsenal would employ, swaging has some advantages- after you have the equipment to do it, you can crank out a lot of projectiles.
That makes me think it's not antimony that caused the different colors.
Whether European bullets would also have been swaged, I don't know.

guys, u maybe r right i have no doubt, however the soil in those two places (20 km far apart) is just so similar u wouldnt believe it but these balls r so different in colour. i thought that perhaps in those years (1859-66) there had be some sort of re-thinking of how to cast bullets in order to achieve beter results on the field.

Remember too that you have no idea what soil was like 150 years ago and its nature could have changed due to moisture, cover crop and decay.

yup fair enough. thanks guys, if anyone will ever "discover" that indeed later balls had a higher concentration of antimony in them pls do not forget to give me a shout :)

The first Minnie ball was smooth sided and used a steel cup to close the hollow base. The cup occasionally punched completely through the bullet.
Alloy bullets were used extensively in muzzle loading times and hunters such as Sir Samuel Baker hardened their spherical bullets with mercury to aid penetration.
Unfortunately there is considerably more contemporary (1850’ to 1860’s) writing about rifles, rifling, trajectory and sights than there is about powder and bullets.
Some of the bullets from the 1850’s must have been hardened as the bullet from the Whitworth rifle with its polygonal rifling penetrated 33 pine boards at 600 yards, as compared to the Enfield rifle which penetrated 12 boards.
Major Nuthall’s rifle used a two diameter bullet for: “fine target shooting” and the standard ffice:smarttags" <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:pEnfield </ST1:p</st1:City>ammunition for military purposes. Interestingly the bullets for the Nuthall rifle were dropped straight from the mold in hot lubricant made of 11 ounces of beeswax and 1 ounce of purified petroleum. The alternate method of lubricating the bullets was to heat them to between 300 and 350 Fahrenheit. It was reported to be useless to apply lubricant at a lower temperature. I wonder if we could define this as “heat treating.”
It is off topic: a Captain Norton cast two part bullets of lead and zinc and made up bullets of lead and willow wood.
I know little about the bullets of this time except the British felt more accurate bullets were made by swaging than casting and that various alloys were in general use for mass production bullets.<O:p</O:p
Out of curiosity what does the bullet at the upper left weigh?
Does the base of any of the bullets give an indication of “tige?” The nose of the bullets do appear to have been upset by a ramrod.
<O:p</O:p<O:p</O:p

The bullets on the left are covered with an oxide layer, lead is self-protecting in that it will form an oxide layer such as this that effectively seals-up the metal under it preventing further corrosion - that is why all the hype about lead bullets & shot contaminating soil & ground water is complete BS.

The yellowish color of the oxide comes from either pigments carried in the oxidizing agent or associated environmental contamination other than plain old soil. That color is usually seen where there is a high concentration of iron, lime or tanic acids - they could have been under a rotting tree, pile of leaves, piece of iron and/or iron ore during the oxidation process - in any event the material that caused the coloration is likely long since gone. The bullets on the right show almost no oxidation indicating the soil conditions where they were at rest was far less corrosive.

markkw said it best.
I wanted to take a picture of some of my Civil War bullets but have not had the opportunity. I stole these pictures from Harry Ridgeway’s web site. Bullets from our <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comhttp://shootersforum.com/ /><st1:country-region w:st=<ST1:pU.S.</st1:country-region> battlefields have similar differences in color.<O:p</O:p

Here is a picture of a few battlefield dig ups from our Civil War.
From L to R: Sharps ring tail - .525” dia. 450-grains
Cavity base .525” 425-grain, a .535” dia.
437-grain cavity base bullet with deep square grease grooves.
Three ring .58 caliber 460-grain bullet from the Washington Arsenal I believe.
Three band 507-grain .58 caliber – a Star bullet I think.
A smooth side cavity base 475-grain bullet – an Enfield bullet I think.
A three groove Williams Type 1 cleaner bullet of 543-grains.
I have a few more with red stains on them but this is probably the most uniformly stained – unfired bullet I have. I would be fun to section one of these and see how the stain is.

ok looking at them
is it possable that the 2 on the right were new cast shot and then seeded for some one to find.
They just don't look like they have been around very long to me.

Anything is possible. They are heavily oxidized and look old to me. The cleaner with the washer looks old to me.