Is this a percussion cap or not?

[Tigerdude]

I don't know.

 

[Charlie P. (NY)]

Looks like the jacket of a fired jacketed lead bullet to me.

 

[Icewing]

Looks like a cap to me.

 

[EccentricInTexas]

Do you have anything for size reference?

 

[d2]

I'm with Charlie P. on this un. Looks like a copper jacket from a bullet. All the caps I've found had 4 "ears"...d2

 

[Spats]

A percussion cap is roughly the same diameter as a .22 shell. Yours looks bigger assuming that is a .58 minie next to it. And the brass looks too frayed. As d2 said, you can usually recognize the four flaps on a used percussion cap.

 

[Icewing]

A percussion cap is roughly the same diameter as a .22 shell. Yours looks bigger assuming that is a .58 minie next to it. And the brass looks too frayed. As d2 said, you can usually recognize the four flaps on a used percussion cap.

There are/were more than one style of top hat caps.


Percussion caps | Museum Collections Up Close : MNHS.ORG

 

[Gavinsdiscoveries]

Prably a cap- maby it was steped on- a few days ago I found a hollow point .22 that looks similar

 

[Tigerdude]

Thanks everyone

 

[Charlie P. (NY)]

Here are the dimensions of a CW era musket cap. Lengths would vary but diameter would not.

Height-.235"

Outside dia.-.240"

Wings-.420"

Inside dia.-.225"

 

[TheCannonballGuy]

It is definitely the stripped-off jacket from a copper-jacketed lead bullet. More specifically, a "semi-jacketed" one... which means the copper jacket did not cover the lead bullet's front end. See the photos below, showing copper-jacketed bullets, fired and unfired, and sawed-in-half.

A related term for jacketed bullets is "Full Metal Jacket." (A famous military movie used that term for its title.) It means the jacket covers all of the lead bullet's body except for an opening in the base, where the lead core was inserted into the jacket.

The lead bullet's jacket is made of a thin metal sheet, not a casting, or "plated." See the sawed-in-half Full Metal Jacket bullet at far left in a photo below. A bullet's jacket is most often copper, but there have been brass, steel, and nickel jacketed lead bullets.

When a semi-jacketed lead bullet hits a semi-soft solid material, such as tree, or clay-type soil, sometimes the jacket catches/snags in the material and the heavier lead core of the bullet comes out of the jacket and keeps on going. The stripped-off copper jacket is what Tigerdude found. Note that its diameter is larger than the typical .24-inch cicil war musket/rifle percussion cap, whose dimensions were astutely provided in post #10 above by my esteemed colleague Charlie_P.

 

[Tigerdude]

Merci!