Tin On Dyer Base

[CarlS]

Hello,

I recently picked up a small shell collection and it had a bucket of frags that came with it.  One of them I found interesting was a base area fragment from a 3-inch Dyer that still has a large piece of the tin attached.  I tried to take good pictures of it but I'm not that good a photography.  Note that this is not the tin straps found on the underside of the sabot but rather a piece of tin that seemed to cover the entire base.  It is surprisingly thick and rigid.  It's also amazing that it tore on the explosion of the shell rather than pulled lose.

[Pete George]

The presence of the thin tinned-iron cup is noted and explained on page 143 of the Dickey-&-George-1993 book. Additional info: It is mostly found on the second and third versions of 3" Dyer shells, because it was an attempt to solve the problem of the first version's zinc sabot failing to properly "stick" to the shell's rounded iron base. Dyer figured that the sabot would adhere better to a tinplated-iron surface than to simple "raw" cast-iron.  He apparently picked up the idea from England's Sir Bashley Britten, who had previously patented a similar method for getting his lead cup sabot to adhere to his projectiles' rounded iron base.