This is all so interesting, I have managed to get the tip out of the other piece of wood and it is pointed, the wood is oak and the only indication of an entry point is a slight discoloration and a small amount of deflection in the grain, the bullet as I can see has not deformed at all. Steve
Birdie.....what is the diameter of the actual round, not the case? ....and just to be clear, the brass bit that holds the bullet is the case, not the jacket....the jacket applies to the actual bullet itself...from the picture, I'm guessing the actual bullet isn't jacketed. The bullet would not be deformed if it was still in the case, which it appears it is.....(unless someone had dropped it).....so I would be a bit carfeul with the other end. Of course it may be safe if someone had taken it apart and removed the charge and re-assembled it (or found a fired round and case and put them back together) but even the primer will have your finger off if that is still live. A pic of the tip may tell me what it is... AL.
This was found as I cut a piece of oak on the circular saw, I don't intend trying to get the remainder out as it is a bit of a curiosity as it is, don't fancy thumping around with a mallet and chisel after what you have said. Never imagined it could possibly still be live. Steve.
Hi Steve, a lot of the discussion is centering around whether the brass coat is part of the case or the bullet. Can you confirm whether the tip is encased in brass, in which case you have just the bullet here. I can't imagine how an unfired round would get embedded in a tree enough for it to grow over
Someone dropped it in the undergrowth or maybe he was up a tree.....or just poked it in there for the hell of it. It is very unlikely the tip would have a brass jacket....brass is too hard for jacketing. At 10mm overall diameter (as Birdie says) it is too large to be anything like a .303 or 7.62...... The calibre of a bullet is measured by the diameter of the actual round IE, the bit that kills you, not the case......a .303 round is 7.6962mm in diameter (7.7mm). PS...With regards to the primer, if it is still live; the content can be very unstable and if there is a charge still in front of the primer plus the base of the actual bullet, you still have a live round. AL.
As a child, I found a .303 round in the clay on the beach I used to live near. I carried around for weeks - it crossed my mind to see whether i could trigger it to fire as I thought it might be live. I couldn't think of a safe way to do it. Someone got wind of it and the police turned up one day to collect it. It was indeed a live round. I remember when I was quite a bit younger and living in the US, I had a lump of metal which resembled a Mills Bomb, without the explosive innards. I preferred my plastic hand grenade though because it had a clip and a removable pin. I suppose, had the real grenade been intact, I'd have preferred that!
Thats quite a fascinating thought Steve. I wonder what the story is behind it? As regards watch the film Full Metal Jacket i would advise anyone not to bother, pure Hollywood dross to be watched from between your fingers. I think slow motion deaths with the soundtrack of a crescendoing string adagio somehow trivialises yet glamourises the horror of war.
The opening of that movie is essential viewing. The tirade of that Gunnery Sergeant to the raw recruits is sheer poetry. It astonished me the first time I saw/heard it.
Birdie.........It appears to me that it could be either .38 calibre, .40 calibre, .401 or .410 or 10mm calibre depending on how accurately you measured it.... It is odd that the acids and juices in the oak don't appear to have damaged / tarnished the jacketing to any extent (I would expect copper or brass would have some green staining)....so OK, it looks quite new....but it has obviously been in the wood for a very long time (25 rings minumum in slow growing oak as well!) which is reinforced by no real disturbance of the woodgrain. If it is as appears it is a brass jacketed bullet, it could be a newer bullet type, many of which are now hollow point or truncated point, and if 10mm calibre and new-ish it is probably American. The newer ones tend to be brass plated. However the brass jacket is to prevent easy deformation of the bullet and is usually armour piercing.....The fact your bullet is hardly deformed indicates it is a penetrating round (even after hitting oak which although a young tree, it's still hard). The point shape of the bullet is very typical of WW2 hand gun and machine gun ammunition, but I would have expected one of those to have definitely deteriorated to some degree after nearly 70 years. Brass jacketing was used during WW2 by some ammo manufacturers because there was a shortage of copper, but until fairly recently weapons users felt the brass jackets badly wore the barrel and rifling, certainly more then copper jackets. Without a really accurate dimension across the brass I can't tell you much more....I certainly doubt it is a rifle bullet....but it could be, all depends how much is left in the other piece of wood. But now that it seems the jacketing is part of the bullet, it is much less likely there is the remains of a live charge behind the remainder. AL
All the more impressive because it was mostly ad-libed. Copied from IMDB trivia Much, if not all, of R. Lee Ermey's dialogue during the Parris Island sequence was improvised. While filming the opening scene, where he disciplines Pvt. Cowboy, he says Cowboy is the type of guy who would have sex with another guy "and not even have the goddamned common courtesy to give him a reach-around". Stanley Kubrickimmediately yelled cut and went over to Ermey and asked, "What the hell is a reach-around?" Ermey politely explained what it meant. Kubrick laughed and re-shot the scene, telling Ermey to keep the line. According to director John Boorman, Stanley Kubrick wanted to cast Bill McKinney in the role of Gunnery Sgt. Hartman. However, Kubrick was so unsettled after viewing McKinney's performance in Deliverance that he declined to meet with him, saying he was simply too frightened at the idea of being in McKinney's presence. Kubrick then hired Tim Colceri to play Hartman. Colceri never got to play the role, as former US Marine Corps Drill Instructor R. Lee Ermey, consultant for the Marine Corps boot camp portion of the film, performed a demonstration on videotape in which he yelled obscene insults and abuse for 15 minutes without stopping, repeating himself or even flinching - despite being continuously pelted with tennis balls and oranges. Stanley Kubrick was so impressed that he cast Ermey as Hartman. Colceri was bitter but accepted Kubrick's consolation prize of a small role as a helicopter door-gunner.
When I was a kid, out rabbiting, one of my mates found a full box of shotgun shells at the side of a field. We balanced them on top of a fencepost & took turns to set them off by shooting the base with our air rifles. That is until we were peppered by lead shot when one spun around when it went off, so then we wedged them between a couple of old bricks, which seemed far safer!
