Name this sabot?

[Treadhead]

Thanks Pete!     The details of the circumstances an item like that was recovered are so very important. (at least to me) Salem’s Church was a very nervous time for Sedgwick’s yankees.  Cut off and almost surrounded, I’m sure they left more than a couple of items lying around before they skedaddled across the Rappahannock.   May I speculate?  Judging from your description, it sounds like someone may have been stacking canister near the month of their guns against regulation. (Again!)

Doug

AKA Treadhead

[John D. Bartleson Jr.]

Below is a complete Dyer Canister, courtesy of Dave the Plumber.
Regards,
John

[Treadhead]

WOW!      Great pictures!  Thanks Dave, with and assist to Bart.

One thing that puzzles me a little is why they took the time to reinforce my Dyer canister sabot with those little tin strips in an “X” pattern on the bottom. Just like the Dyer shells & case shot.  (Dave’s sabot doesn’t have it)  My understanding is that the reinforcement was to prevent the sabots from cracking in the gun, which in turn caused the shells to fail to take to the rifling.  Canister didn’t need to spin.  In fact, that was a bad thing for canister.  So why bother with the reinforcement? …………  Any thoughts?

Can anyone else tell me if they’ve seen these “X” reinforcements on other dyer canister sabots?

Doug

AKA Treadhead

[gflower]

Sorry for the delay been busy with Gator bowl stuff petersburg is where I found the dyer bottoms and slugs. Speed enforcer we are not in the new court house until may so your good to come by

[John D. Bartleson Jr.]

Doug,
    Perhaps they didn't care if canister took the rifling or not.  Would it have to in order to perform?
John

[CarlS]

The sabot is used on canister to take the rifling not to impart rotation but to seal the bore so the projectile can take full advantage of cannon's exploding charge and not lose some to windage.  You'll see a lead cup on the Hotchkiss and James as well for this.  Interestingly you don't on Parrott (wood sabot similar to smooth bore) and Sawyer (iron can) canister.

On Jack Melton's web site (http://www.civilwarartillery.com/) in two of his 3-inch Dyer examples, he had this to say about the tin straps on a Dyer:

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From: http://www.civilwarartillery.com/projectiles/rifled/FAOIIIa66.htm -
A pair of crossed tin straps were soldered to the iron base of the projectile through a hole in the lead base.  This was an attempt to help correct the problem of the sabots falling off the projectile after leaving the cannon.

From: http://www.civilwarartillery.com/projectiles/rifled/IIIA60.htm -
Often the lead sabot of the 3-inch Dyer projectile became separated during firing. According to a letter found in the National Archives written by Major J.G. Benton to General Alexander B. Dyer and dated October 28, 1864, this problem was corrected: "...the old cups can be easily removed and good ones put on at a cost to the Government of 15 cents. There are about 55,000 of these projectiles at this Arsenal and I think that they can be made serviceable by Mr. Taylor's plan...Forty projectiles arranged in this way were fired without a single failure or detachment of the sabot."
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I don't know anything about straps being used on Dyer canister but I can't imagine what the value of them would be other than possibly strengthening the base so it doesn't disintegrate on discharge.  The Dyer canister sabot in my collection does not have straps.

[Treadhead]

gflower,
Thanks for the clarification on Petersburg.  That helps.  There’s just to many “bergs” in the Civil War to count.

Carl, 
Your thoughts suggesting they may have wanted to make sure they sealed the bore make a lot of sense to me.    Perhaps they didn’t yet realize that the spin hurt the distribution of the canister balls or bullets.  Hopefully some day I’ll find more info. 

To John’s question about the rifling’s effect on canister;
If you read between the lines looking at the limited number of Dyer canister bases recovered, it would seem that something wasn’t quite right with the Dyer canister.  The Hotchkiss canister, which was designed to limit the rifling effect, appears to have been available in limited numbers on the Peninsula.  About the same time the Dyer canister would have been used heavily for the first time.  Obviously the Hotchkiss canister won the competition as over 100,000 were manufactured during the war.   That’s significant if for no other reason than the Dyer canister was designed by Ordnance officers.  The Ordnance Department repeatedly rejected adopting private designs like Hotchkiss’ canister until almost forced to by failures of their designs in the field.

Based on the recoveries mentioned before in the thread, and a few inventory sheets of Ordnance issued to field troops I saw at the National Archives, it would seem that a few Dyer canister rounds were salted away in the limber chests for a special occasion for the majority of the war.  At least in the East.  Given the nature of the large number of bullets in the round, for those nasty short range close encounters seems the best reason to keep a few on hand. 

To all: A posting of any other recoveries of Dyer canister bases or bullets would always be greatly appreciated.

Doug

AKA Treadhead

[John D. Bartleson Jr.]

Doug,
   Thank you for your timely input to the Forum.  It is information such as yours and others that make this new Forum very interesting.

[Dave the plumber]

      The necessity of tin straps make zero sense to me, unless it was to help keep the round together in shipping and during travel in the limber.  That is the only good explanation I can come up with.
      I understand the need for the lead sabot to fill the rifling to keep gas pressure behind the round 'pushing' on the cannister pieces as high as possible for maximum effectiveness and destructiveness through travel.
     I agree that imparting spin of the contents keeps them together more as they travel through the air, which as mentioned earlier, isn't necessarily a good thing  [ depends on the range of your target though ]


    As a plumber of the old school, I know how difficult it is to join the two different materials of cast iron and lead.......Back in the day, we would take cast iron, heat it up with a torch, apply flux to clean it and prep the surface, then use a bar of lead that is actually  50 % of tin antimony and 50 % lead and melt that onto the prepared, hot cast iron, using a special stiff cotton fabric with melted candle wax on it as a trowel or spatula to distribute it evenly. We actually had to melt the wax onto the fabric ourselves each time we used it.The lead wouldn't stick to the fabric with the wax on it. We called this 'tinning' it  Then we would carefully, very carefully, use a torch to gently melt the lead into the tinning on the cast iron, adding more solder as necessary to create the bond. The lead we worked with was only maybe 1\8 inch thick, so a thick dense sabot would be much more forgiving. We had to be able to do this in the field, and I had to demonstrate it to get my master plumbers license back in the last century sometime. Thank goodness for pvc !!
        Anyway, I can see why attaching a lead cup style sabot to a rounded bottom cast iron shell would require the tin straps to help hold it all together - loose the sabot and your projectile's flight is severly effected. But, I have no idea why they would use tin straps on a cannister \ shotgun style round, unless it were to hold it together for shipping.
    Sorry for the long response.....

[Pete George]

  The straps don't have anything to do with holding the sabot onto the shell's base.  (Hasn't anybody noticed that contrary to the statement, the straps never pass "through a hole in the lead base."  They are simply soldered onto the sabot.

  Nor anything to do with "strengthening" the sabot.

  Nor anything to do with the letter from Major Benton to Dyer which announced the discovery of a remedy for the sabot-separation problem, in late-October 1864.

  I've been telling people for at least 25 years that the tinned-iron straps held a powderbag, as "Fixed" ammunition.  In the mid-1980s, a large cache of unfired 3" Dyers was found on the Fredericksburg battlefield.  Some of those Dyers were so well-preserved that the straps hadn't entirely rusted away, and they curved "downward" (away from the sabot).  Also, some of them had bits of the powderbag fabric still remaining.

  Anybody who doesn't want to believe me can talk to some of the oldtime Fredericksburg diggers (like Dennis Cox, Danny Elkins, and Dan Poppen) who will surely remember the discovery of that fabulous shell-cache.  It was dug near the Ferry Farm, on the Stafford Heights (yankee-occupied) side of the Rappahannock River, about a mile or two south of the old center of Fredericksburg.  That cache contained a mix of unfired 3" Dyers and 3" Schenkls.  They were in remarkably well-preserved condition.  Several of the Schenkls still had the almost-fully-intact zinc "sleeve" covering their paper mache' sabot.

  The Dyers were of even greater interest to me than those zinc-sleeved Schenkls.  In addition to the well-preserved powderbag-holding straps, several variations of the Dyers had a good bit of original Ordnance Department color-coding paint on the sabot.  The Common-Shells had orange paint, the Case-Shot had red paint, and the Percussion-shells (containining Schenkl Percussion fuzes) had green paint.  Which is why I've also been saying for 25 years that those colors are the colorcode for civil war Army artillery projectiles.

  Proof of the Army Artillery colorcode: In addition to the Fredericksburg cache, other sabots and fuzes have been dug with those colors (and only those colors) on them ...but that is a subject for a separate post ...I intended this one to be mainly about the Dyer sabot crossed tinned-iron straps' purpose.

Regards,
Pete

[Treadhead]

Hi Pete,

I always look forward to your posts.   You have so much personal knowledge and wonderful detail to share.  I’m aware of the Taylor modifications to the Dyer in 1864 and have a fair amount of detail on that subject.  The tin “X’ seems to have showed up as early as Malvern Hill in early July 1862.  Fixed rifled ammunition (powder bag attached directly to the projectile) was not a common practice, but there is enough written references to say it was done.   Certainly the canister round makes perfect sense as there would be times when you wanted to fire these as fast as you could.   I believe they did “fix” Hotchkiss shell, case shot & canister rounds as well. But I would debate that the tin strips were not used to strengthen the sabot.  I didn’t address these areas as the post was about the seemingly obscure Dyer canister round and didn’t want to draw too far away from that subject.

Perhaps a new thread for a friendly debate on this subject is a good idea?   

Doug

[CarlS]

Pete:  Thanks for the info on that cache.  Do you know of any images/pictures of this find showing that?  I would very much like to see how that attachement looked.

[John D. Bartleson Jr.]

Additionaly, can someone post the letter from Major Benton to Dyer which announced the discovery of a remedy for the sabot?
John

[Pete George]

Treadhead (Doug) wrote:
> Perhaps a new thread for a friendly debate on this subject is a good idea?   

  Sure, I'm up for that.    Like you, I didn't want to drag the discussion too far away from the original topic.

Regards,
Pete

[Treadhead]

Great, I'll post the new thread "Those Pesky Little X's" tonight after work.  The worst thing that can happen is that we all learn a little more! 

John, I'll see if I can find some editable text reference on the work Taylor did to the Dyer 1864.   If not, we’ll have to talk offline.

Doug

AKA

Treadhead