Blown Cannonball

[Tom Hughes]

I'm spending the day today cleaning up relics I've found this year relic hunting in the Vicksburg area. Here are fragments to a 12 pounder Bormann shell that I found and will glue together today. It will make up half of the original shell's body cavity. Should display well. I can put a little clay in between the cracks to shore it up better. Thanks for looking.

 

[bdtex]

I was on the road last Saturday and missed this. Fun with relics. Perhaps you could make that work somehow without applying adhesives?

 

[Tom Hughes]

I was on the road last Saturday and missed this. Fun with relics. Perhaps you could make that work somehow without applying adhesives?

I just glued them together and sealed the gaps. It came out good I think. I'll post up a picture later today. I mainly wanted to resurrect these fragments into the shape of the shell it once was. Thanks for looking.

 

[bdtex]

I just glued them together and sealed the gaps. It came out good I think. I'll post up a picture later today. I mainly wanted to resurrect these fragments into the shape of the shell it once was. Thanks for looking.

It's quite remarkable to me that you found them all from the same shell that fit like that. I would think that's a rare find.

 

[Tom Hughes]

It's quite remarkable to me that you found them all from the same shell that fit like that. I would think that's a rare find.

It is unusual. I figure the top of the shell blew upward and the fragments of the bottom of the shell blew down into the ground.

 

[Tom Hughes]

A few years back I found a 6 pounder ball in Vicksburg that must have detonated fuze first in the ground. I found all the pieces of the top of the shell including the Bormann fuze and the iron underplug. I was able to reconstruct that one as well.
A few years before that I found a nice groundburst 12 pounder on the Port Gibson battlefield and reconstructed it. Those ball fragments were in a 3 foot area.
But the best groundburst I've ever found was in the Yankee siege lines of Vicksburg. I got a signal on my metal detector and dug up all 3 sections to a Confederate 3.3'' Read shell. It had been a percussion shell and hit nose first. But for the life of me I was unable to locate the fuze. It HAS to still be in the hole. I imagine it blew with such force that it sent the brass fuze deep into the earth beyond the range of my metal detector's depth.