Largest Cast Boolit Ever Discussed Here !!

[RFWobbly]

Check out this news story. Of course the "boolit" in question was cast Fe and not Pb, and even though the caliber was slightly larger than norm, I found it very interesting reading....

http://www.inrich.com/cva/ric/news.apx.-content-articles-RTD-2008-02-21-0099.html

[Tom Herman]

Thanks for sharing the story with us. I'm so sorry to hear about the accident. My heart goes out to the family on their loss.
I followed the links to the other stories related to it.
It's amazing that there is still dangerous ordnance out there from over 140 years ago!
Safety is very important to me. That's why I don't hot rod loads, or push old guns too hard.
If I were the one defusing old ordnance, I would do it by remote drilling, and use PLENTY of water!
As a sidenote, there are all sorts of more modern nasties out there! In WWII, we had Tovex which IIRC was TNT with a hefty percentage of Aluminum powder mixed in.
Someone that I know was hired by the government to detonate dumps full of that stuff left in the Pacific islands during and after the war.. He said the stuff was frightfully unstable, and the explosions were monstrous!
Another very unstable material was the Picric Acid filling the Japs used for most of their stuff: It's bad enough, but if it leaks onto concrete, or corrodes the container it's in, the instability goes up by orders of magnitude... Imagine exploding concrete! That stuff makes 140 year old black powder look like baby powder...

-Tom

[Ricochet]

Picric acid used to be used in high school chemistry labs. May still be some in lab storerooms. If it was in glass jars with metal tops (as it was in those days), it can form picrates with the metal of the jar lid that have been reported to detonate when the lid was unscrewed. I got an old jar removed from my high school when I was a kid. Would've loved to have it to play with and could easily have "liberated" it, but I was afraid to open it and had no blasting cap for "proper use" anyway.

[Bent Ramrod]

It is still eminently possible to be the "last casualty" of the Civil War, Spanish-American War or WWI or II. When I was a kid, I read about someone who decided to screw two Civil War cannonballs onto handcrafted wrought-iron stands by the fuze wells to use as fireplace andirons. Interesting conversation pieces until one festive evening when he put one too many logs on the fire.

I remember the picric acid scare as well. We used to use it to paint numbers on laboratory rats so we could tell one from the other. It was bitter enough so they couldn't lick it off for a week or so. A lot of high-school principals got their pictures in the paper carrying that jar of picric acid out of the chem stockroom to be destroyed by the fire department.

The Safety & Labor Relations officer of the explosives company I was working with at the time saw one of these news stories and rooted through our Research stockroom until he found the jar we had, and ordered it destroyed. I sure hated to waste good chemicals back then, but took it down to our test station and set it off. Smokiest explosion I ever saw.