Read with copper in iron?

[alwion]

cleaned this  Read the other day and looks to have voids repaired with braze or somehow had voids filled with copper. Is this common and have we seen this before? they are attached extremely well and I am assuming were used to fill casting voids. seems light also for a 3.4" even considering the pitting, could all the metal be porous?

3.36"
7 3/4" tall
10 lbs 11 oz

[emike123]

I have seen this before on CS shells made with crummy, particulalry late war, iron that made it impossible not to have casting bubbles that would've pockmarked the surface and I guess the thinking was created wind resistance or affected the line of flight.  I will say yours has more voids filled than normal, but maybe they were getting pretty desperate by that time.

[CarlS]

I guess they used copper instead of lead as it was closer to the weight of iron and especially in an extreme case like this wouldn't cause wobbling in flight.  Really neat shell.

[alwion]

this was supposed to be Brandy station in 1863

[Pete George]

You say your read shell is reported to be from Brandy Station VA, and it is a 3.4"-caliber shell.  I am not aware  of any 3.4"-caliber cannon being present at Brandy Station... but several 3.5" Blakely Rifles were used at that battle.  Assuming your Read shell is a fired one, the number of rifling grooves on the sabot will tell you whether it was fired from a 3.5" Blakely or a 3.4" Virginia Reamed-&-Rifled 4-Pounder Smoothbore.  The Virginia 3.4 rifle had three wide lands-&-grooves.

About the copper in your Read shell's casting-flaws:
  Long ago I owned a Georgia-dug 2.9"-caliber Read-Blakely sabot shell. It had thin traces of copper on its lower sides above the copper sabot. I believe the copper on the shell's iron sides was due to "bleed through" (or, "over-run") in the use of a counter-mold for casting the copper sabot onto the shell's base.  If you are unfamiliar with a counter-mold, the term means a casting mold which fits closely around an object, which allows you to cast something onto (or around) the body of the object.  For example, a counter-mold was used to cast brass Parrott sabots onto the projectile's sabotless body.  You can sometimes see some "bleed-through/over-run" along the edge of a brass Parrott "short ring" (not band) sabot.

  I've also seen a sawed-in-half Read shell whose copper sabot got partially melted by molten iron when the iron shell body was being cast around the copper sabot. In the photo attached below, you can clearly see "nuggets" of copper inside the sawed-in-half iron of the shell's base and at the nose area.  The "nuggets" are visible inside the red circles on Emike's excellent photo.

  I have not previously heard of the use of any metal other than lead (or perhaps lead-alloy Solder) for patching casting flaws on projectile bodies. Because the melting temperature of copper is about four times higher than the melting temperature of lead, and it is therefore much more difficult to "work with", I think using copper for patching is very unlikely.

Regards,
Pete

[alwion]

Hi Pete, I'll try and field some intelligent answer, starting in reverse. I fully believe it could be bleed over from the sabot casting, if it ran all the way down to the nose and filled voids. I still clean my shells with a hammer, and these "globs were originally dark as the iron. I tapped them pretty good thinking they were rust flakes, as the edges lifted up. Near as I can tell they are very substantially embedded into the shell, I even tried to lever one off which is when I first saw the copper.
either way they are there and firmly attached

brandy station was verbal from the digger, but dealer didn't get his name:{

measuring. I used a dia tape, and machinist calipers. though unfired, sabot is a little out of round
pia tape 3 23/64, which I got 3.365
miked its a little over and under depending
seemed to match book pg  274, because the length, which is a 3.5"

my only confusion then would be weight, used a 25 lb utility scale which may be off some, but having used it for years for postage( came from a post office) wouldn't be off 1 3/4 lbs, but casting, metal quality, and metal loss may be enough to account for the weight difference from the book weight