Differences in .54 & .58 calibre minie balls

[tennesseelead]

Joe,
      Just looking for a clarifaction of the facts.  The info you provided & the way you provided it-to me-was just fine.
kp

[emike123]

Apologies for the delay in "clarifying the facts," but several of us have been at the Dalton Show.  vI just got back late last night.

A sober evaluation of the facts supports Jim's research.  Here is a picture of one of the bullets being referred to, MM303.

As you can see it weighs in at 0.320 of an ounce.  16/0.320 = exactly 50 bullets to the pound.

These bullets were made to bring standardization to the Picket or Kentucky rifles brought by private citizens to the war.  Many of these were of small caliber and standardized to .32 and .36 which is not heavy especially when they have a cavity.

[joevann]

50 to the pound for a small caliber sporting gun seems reasonable.  But 100 to the pound?  Did such a muzzle-loading rifle of that small a caliber ever exist in sufficient numbers to justify the ordering of more than perhaps ONE mold?

[joevann]

We've gotten off on a tangeant.  The Military Board of Tennesse was using an archaic method of referring to the caliber of rifles they wanted minie balls made for by the number of ROUND balls of lead the exact size of the bore that would weigh one pound rather than using a caliber expressed in hundredths of an inch.  They WERE NOT referring to the number of minie balls that would weigh one pound when cast from the mold.  Today, we would call this the 'gauge' rather than the caliber.  A 12ga. shotgun is so designated because 12 lead balls the diameter of the bore weigh one pound.  When Meriweather Lewis in his journal described shooting two ducks with on bullet from a rifle of 100 caliber, he was refering to a rifle that took 100 balls of lead the diameter of the bore to weigh 1 pound.  In 'An Essay on Shooting, by T. Cadell in 1791,  in discussing fowlers :“The Spanish barrels are generally from three to three and a half feet long; their caliber is from 22 to 24*, and their weight from three to three and a half pounds.
* In speaking of the size of the caliber, we mean by 22 or 24, that so many balls exactly fitting it weigh just one pound; and every caliber is marked in the same way.”

In short,  if you want to tell the difference between a .54 minie ball and a .58 minie ball, buy some decent dial calipers   There is going to be a lot of variation in weight, but if the diameter is greater than .539 it isn't going to fit in a .54 caliber rifle.   BTW the modern U.S. Navy uses caliber to refer to the length of the barrel expressed in bore diameters.   For instance a 5"-54 caliber means a gun with a 5" diameter bore with a barrel 22'-6" Long.

[tennesseelead]

And you could of heard a pin drop.
kp

[Daveslem]

If one pound of lead is 7000 grains then 7000/100 would equal 70 grains. 70 grains falls into 30-32 caliber by weight (elongated shot).  I'm sure with all the varmint hunting that went on down south that there had to be some small caliber rifles brought from home to fight with until something better was supplied. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.

[joevann]

Except that in all of M&M there are only a few bullets of this weight and none could be described as a Minie.  The classic squirrel gun would have been .32 caliber (although some smaller calibers were made by individual gunsmiths), even a .32 caliber minie ball would weigh more than 70 grains.