Dodged a bullet———almost

[DBC]

Recently I made some beech joinery for a bedroom; wardrobes and drawers either side of a chimney. As I was trimming the stiles down on one of the larger doors with a tracksaw I could feel that I had hit something. I had previously noticed a very faint greenish discolouration on the endgrain of this peice. About the size of my little fingernail. I didn’t really stop to worry about this as it was on the top edge of the door so could not be seen. What my saw hit is pictured below.

In this next picture you can see the groove my sawblade made in the bullet before I stopped cutting.

I am actually f@cken lucky as this peice of timber - in its journey from a rough sawn piece of timber to a wardrobe - had been across the jointer and table saw, through the thicknesser, and had a pass from the wobble saw in my spindle moulder. Also a domino machine had made a mortice hole not too far from it. All in all I am pleased that out of all these blades and knives it was the cheapest and easiest to replace that got ruined.

Just goes to show that you have never seen it all.

The extreme right hand door of the middle row is the bullet door.

 

[Jameshow]

Any idea how the bullet got there?

If only wood could talk?

Take it to the local cop shop, put it on the counter and ask them what it is.....!

 

[artie]

Bit of a mystery as it doesn't look like it's been fired.

 

[Bingy man]

Unbelievable and the perfect title for your thread,, if that bullet is live and still contains a viable charge you have indeed “dodged a bullet “ ..

 

[DBC]

Bit of a mystery as it doesn't look like it's been fired.

Yea. I think it must have been fired as there is no casing and how else could it get in there but as Beechwood is hard I thought it should be deformed somehow. The timber was completed encased around it; I mean there wasn’t something like a pathway leading to it that I could see. I didn’t realise it was a bullet at first when I removed it as it was covered in a blob of hard green resin which it took a while to completely scrape off. Maybe it was fired into a very young tree?

I found this picture by googling copper 22 bullet.

 

[Graham Brazier]

Awesome , you could make use of that now , mount it in a frame with a note of where you found it and picture of the work piece

 

[artie]

Yea. I think it must have been fired as there is no casing

Yes there's no casing, but it may never have been loaded.
It looks like a .303/7.62 but it's impossible to tell from the photo.
How much does it weigh?.
It doesn't take much to slightly deform a bullet that's been fired

 

[Keith 66]

In the first photo you can see the faint grooves left by the rifling. Its a full metal jacket military round so has held together, a hunting round with a soft nose would have deformed badly. Not uncommon on the continent where most beech comes from, hitting bullets embedded in trees is an occupational hazard for sawmills. I saw a photo in an old woodworker magazine years ago where they found an unexploded shell in a tree.

 

[Bingy man]

A truly remarkable story-it might of been placed between two branches and the tree just grew naturally around it .

 

[Argus]

Very interesting little find........

It reminds me of a delivery of waney-edged French Oak that I had about 20 years ago.

Long-story-short, I cut and stacked the boards and eventually got around to using them. One of the things that came from that load was a large table and in the process I came across two very old lead bullets, deeply embedded and quite deformed by the impact.

By the time I found them, I had disposed of the bark and sap-wood, so it was impossible to say when the trees were shot in relation to when they were cut down, but I kept the pieces with the table as a conversation piece. The scar-tissue from the impact extended about a foot or so along the grain-pattern, but I only found them when they went through the thicknesser.
Here's a picture of what were probably a couple of pistol balls, sitting on the table that the tree made:

.

 

[Sandyn]

I think it's been fired, I'm sure there are rifling marks on the bullet. It's lead filled in a copper case. No charge inside. If fired into a tree, the wood pressure would tend to retain the shape of the bullet. Remember it is spinning. There are many pictures of perfectly shaped bullets embedded in wood. It could also simply have lodged in the tree after falling or placed there and the tree grown around it. Looks very like a .303
Here's a .303 bullet I have. Not been fired

 

[DBC]

Very interesting little find........

It reminds me of a delivery of waney-edged French Oak that I had about 20 years ago.

Long-story-short, I cut and stacked the boards and eventually got around to using them. One of the things that came from that load was a large table and in the process I came across two very old lead bullets, deeply embedded and quite deformed by the impact.

By the time I found them, I had disposed of the bark and sap-wood, so it was impossible to say when the trees were shot in relation to when they were cut down, but I kept the pieces with the table as a conversation piece. The scar-tissue from the impact extended about a foot or so along the grain-pattern, but I only found them when they went through the thicknesser.
Here's a picture of what were probably a couple of pistol balls, sitting on the table that the tree made:

View attachment 133514


.

Its nice to know I’m not the only one weird things happen to. Pleased I didn’t find mine while thicknessing.

 

[DBC]

Awesome , you could make use of that now , mount it in a frame with a note of where you found it and picture of the work piece

When I showed it to the customer who I made the wardrobes for they seemed so uninterested. But the guys at the sawmill had a good laugh. But they didn’t take me seriously when I joked that my next order should be discounted by the cost of one tracksaw blade.

 

[Argus]

................................ But they didn’t take me seriously when I joked that my next order should be discounted by the cost of one tracksaw blade.

Good point.
London Plane trees were originally planted in the 18th/19th Centuries as they were tolerant of the polluted atmosphere in the Metropolis.

Fast forward to when a lot were cut down in recent times - quarter-sawn London Plane translates as a type of Lacewood - most sawmills won't touch it on account of the probability of sawing into bits of shrapnel from the Blitz.

 

[artie]

In the first photo you can see the faint grooves left by the rifling.

I think it's been fired, I'm sure there are rifling marks on the bullet.

Well spotted. I can see that now I'm on the PC.

Just makes it more intriguing.

 

[Inspector]

If the bullet was almost spent before hitting the tree it wouldn't deform and the tree would grow around it. A high powered rifle bullet can travel 5 miles before running out of energy and falling to earth. Even a little .22 travels a mile. You have a story to go along with a nice little souvenir. The customer may not appreciate it but we do.

Pete

 

[EvaBeaver]

Unbelievable and the perfect title for your thread,, if that bullet is live and still contains a viable charge you have indeed “dodged a bullet “ ..

Its a cast bullet, not a full round so it just a lump of copper jacketted lead and not dangerous to anything except your saw blade. Looking at it it's from a centrefire cartridge and not a rimfire

 

[nickds1]

Looks to me like a jacketed slug from a .223 (Remington) or 5.56mm (NATO) round.

Very standard hunting round if you're after bigger game like deer. If your timber came from woodland where there's hunting, finding slugs is unusual but not exactly rare.

We have an oak window sill which also had a slug in it but it was only found some years after installation when we were re-oiling all the windows

 

[Jonm]

A colleague at work had a wife who was very safety conscious, probably obsessively so. The tv programme 999 was a nightmare for him, yes I am going back a long way.

He moved house and was building a workshop, digging the footings by hand. Came in to work one monday morning with the following story. His wife looked at what he was doing and started digging out something in the side of the trench which took her interest. What is this, she asked, holding an unexplored shell in her hands. Apparently it was from a Second World War anti aircraft gun.

 

[Devmeister]

I was running some quarter saw white oak over a 24 in Oliver jointer a few years back.

when you hear the jointer dig in to the lead you know! Flipped the board over and there was the left overs of a civil war mini ball.

to me it looked like a deformed mass of lead. About the size of a golf ball. I remember thinking OMG They actually used to hunt humans with that?! I mean it was huge!