Help on dating bullet

[Jarod84]

Hello, Does anyone know the rough date this bullet may be?


Thank you.

 

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[TheCannonballGuy]

The (dirty) white-ish oxidation on your bullet indicates it is made of pure lead, instead of a "hardened-lead" alloy which does not oxidize white-ish. Pure lead bullets got replaced by hardened-lead ones when quick-repeating firearms became the standard, instead of the old slow single-shot firearms. The reason is, pure lead is actually a soft metal, and firing lots of soft lead bullets through the gunbarrel caused a buildup of "lead smearing" inside the gunbarrel's rifling grooves. So, "hardened-lead" alloy (for example, lead mixed with Antimony or Zinc) was developed to eliminate the gunbarrel-clogging produced by using soft pure-lead bullets. What all of that longwinded info means for dating your bullet is, it's "most likely" from before the 1890s. But its shape does not match up with any civil war bullets in the books on that subject. So I'd say, 1870s/80s, maybe early 90s.