# Dodged a bullet———almost



## DBC (12 Apr 2022)

Recently I made some beech joinery for a bedroom; wardrobes and drawers either side of a chimney. As I was trimming the stiles down on one of the larger doors with a tracksaw I could feel that I had hit something. I had previously noticed a very faint greenish discolouration on the endgrain of this peice. About the size of my little fingernail. I didn’t really stop to worry about this as it was on the top edge of the door so could not be seen. What my saw hit is pictured below.











In this next picture you can see the groove my sawblade made in the bullet before I stopped cutting.





I am actually [email protected] lucky as this peice of timber - in its journey from a rough sawn piece of timber to a wardrobe - had been across the jointer and table saw, through the thicknesser, and had a pass from the wobble saw in my spindle moulder. Also a domino machine had made a mortice hole not too far from it. All in all I am pleased that out of all these blades and knives it was the cheapest and easiest to replace that got ruined.

Just goes to show that you have never seen it all.





The extreme right hand door of the middle row is the bullet door.


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## Jameshow (12 Apr 2022)

Any idea how the bullet got there? 

If only wood could talk? 

Take it to the local cop shop, put it on the counter and ask them what it is.....!


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## artie (12 Apr 2022)

Bit of a mystery as it doesn't look like it's been fired.


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## Bingy man (12 Apr 2022)

Unbelievable and the perfect title for your thread,, if that bullet is live and still contains a viable charge you have indeed “dodged a bullet “ ..


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## DBC (13 Apr 2022)

artie said:


> Bit of a mystery as it doesn't look like it's been fired.


Yea. I think it must have been fired as there is no casing and how else could it get in there but as Beechwood is hard I thought it should be deformed somehow. The timber was completed encased around it; I mean there wasn’t something like a pathway leading to it that I could see. I didn’t realise it was a bullet at first when I removed it as it was covered in a blob of hard green resin which it took a while to completely scrape off. Maybe it was fired into a very young tree?

I found this picture by googling copper 22 bullet.


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## Graham Brazier (13 Apr 2022)

Awesome , you could make use of that now , mount it in a frame with a note of where you found it and picture of the work piece


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## artie (13 Apr 2022)

DBC said:


> Yea. I think it must have been fired as there is no casing


Yes there's no casing, but it may never have been loaded.
It looks like a .303/7.62 but it's impossible to tell from the photo.
How much does it weigh?.
It doesn't take much to slightly deform a bullet that's been fired


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## Keith 66 (13 Apr 2022)

In the first photo you can see the faint grooves left by the rifling. Its a full metal jacket military round so has held together, a hunting round with a soft nose would have deformed badly. Not uncommon on the continent where most beech comes from, hitting bullets embedded in trees is an occupational hazard for sawmills. I saw a photo in an old woodworker magazine years ago where they found an unexploded shell in a tree.


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## Bingy man (13 Apr 2022)

A truly remarkable story-it might of been placed between two branches and the tree just grew naturally around it .


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## Argus (13 Apr 2022)

Very interesting little find........

It reminds me of a delivery of waney-edged French Oak that I had about 20 years ago.

Long-story-short, I cut and stacked the boards and eventually got around to using them. One of the things that came from that load was a large table and in the process I came across two very old lead bullets, deeply embedded and quite deformed by the impact.

By the time I found them, I had disposed of the bark and sap-wood, so it was impossible to say when the trees were shot in relation to when they were cut down, but I kept the pieces with the table as a conversation piece. The scar-tissue from the impact extended about a foot or so along the grain-pattern, but I only found them when they went through the thicknesser.
Here's a picture of what were probably a couple of pistol balls, sitting on the table that the tree made:







.


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## Sandyn (13 Apr 2022)

I think it's been fired, I'm sure there are rifling marks on the bullet. It's lead filled in a copper case. No charge inside. If fired into a tree, the wood pressure would tend to retain the shape of the bullet. Remember it is spinning. There are many pictures of perfectly shaped bullets embedded in wood. It could also simply have lodged in the tree after falling or placed there and the tree grown around it. Looks very like a .303
Here's a .303 bullet I have. Not been fired


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## DBC (13 Apr 2022)

Argus said:


> Very interesting little find........
> 
> It reminds me of a delivery of waney-edged French Oak that I had about 20 years ago.
> 
> ...



Its nice to know I’m not the only one weird things happen to. Pleased I didn’t find mine while thicknessing.


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## DBC (13 Apr 2022)

Graham Brazier said:


> Awesome , you could make use of that now , mount it in a frame with a note of where you found it and picture of the work piece



When I showed it to the customer who I made the wardrobes for they seemed so uninterested. But the guys at the sawmill had a good laugh. But they didn’t take me seriously when I joked that my next order should be discounted by the cost of one tracksaw blade.


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## Argus (13 Apr 2022)

DBC said:


> ................................ But they didn’t take me seriously when I joked that my next order should be discounted by the cost of one tracksaw blade.



Good point.
London Plane trees were originally planted in the 18th/19th Centuries as they were tolerant of the polluted atmosphere in the Metropolis.

Fast forward to when a lot were cut down in recent times - quarter-sawn London Plane translates as a type of Lacewood - most sawmills won't touch it on account of the probability of sawing into bits of shrapnel from the Blitz.


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## artie (13 Apr 2022)

Keith 66 said:


> In the first photo you can see the faint grooves left by the rifling.






Sandyn said:


> I think it's been fired, I'm sure there are rifling marks on the bullet.



Well spotted. I can see that now I'm on the PC.

Just makes it more intriguing.


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## Inspector (13 Apr 2022)

If the bullet was almost spent before hitting the tree it wouldn't deform and the tree would grow around it. A high powered rifle bullet can travel 5 miles before running out of energy and falling to earth. Even a little .22 travels a mile. You have a story to go along with a nice little souvenir. The customer may not appreciate it but we do.

Pete


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## EvaBeaver (13 Apr 2022)

Bingy man said:


> Unbelievable and the perfect title for your thread,, if that bullet is live and still contains a viable charge you have indeed “dodged a bullet “ ..


Its a cast bullet, not a full round so it just a lump of copper jacketted lead and not dangerous to anything except your saw blade. Looking at it it's from a centrefire cartridge and not a rimfire


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## nickds1 (14 Apr 2022)

Looks to me like a jacketed slug from a .223 (Remington) or 5.56mm (NATO) round.

Very standard hunting round if you're after bigger game like deer. If your timber came from woodland where there's hunting, finding slugs is unusual but not exactly rare.

We have an oak window sill which also had a slug in it but it was only found some years after installation when we were re-oiling all the windows


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## Jonm (14 Apr 2022)

A colleague at work had a wife who was very safety conscious, probably obsessively so. The tv programme 999 was a nightmare for him, yes I am going back a long way.

He moved house and was building a workshop, digging the footings by hand. Came in to work one monday morning with the following story. His wife looked at what he was doing and started digging out something in the side of the trench which took her interest. What is this, she asked, holding an unexplored shell in her hands. Apparently it was from a Second World War anti aircraft gun.


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## Devmeister (14 Apr 2022)

I was running some quarter saw white oak over a 24 in Oliver jointer a few years back.

when you hear the jointer dig in to the lead you know! Flipped the board over and there was the left overs of a civil war mini ball.

to me it looked like a deformed mass of lead. About the size of a golf ball. I remember thinking OMG They actually used to hunt humans with that?! I mean it was huge!


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## bansobaby (14 Apr 2022)

nickds1 said:


> Looks to me like a jacketed slug from a .223 (Remington) or 5.56mm (NATO) round.
> 
> Very standard hunting round if you're after bigger game like deer. If your timber came from woodland where there's hunting, finding slugs is unusual but not exactly rare.
> 
> We have an oak window sill which also had a slug in it but it was only found some years after installation when we were re-oiling all the windows


You can't legally shoot deer other than muntjac and CWD with .223 calibre in the UK.....


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## alz (14 Apr 2022)

My father was in the Home Guard during the war, and years later I found a box in the workshop bench full of 9mm and .303 rounds, along with 12-bore ball cartridges covered in cobwebs. There was also a small .32 revolver that I sneaked up to my bedroom, tried trigger to see if still worked ...and bang, a bullet went straight through the ceiling and narrowly missed the cold water tank before lodging in a beam. Guess it's still there in the old house.


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## jcassidy (14 Apr 2022)

When I was about 10, I managed to nick a couple of rounds of 5.56 ammunition from a friend's dad - I knew he wouldn't say anything 'cos he'd get in major trouble for bringing ammunition home! (My dad was an MP CQMS and we lived next to an army barracks so I was well up on army regs!). I had the great idea to turn them into keyrings. I knew enough to pry the bullet out and empty the powder, but I didn't know about the primer...

So I started drilling a hole in the end.... those primers make quite a bang for such a small thing!!!

Everyone loved the keyring, though.


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## mickbc (15 Apr 2022)

Bingy man said:


> Unbelievable and the perfect title for your thread,, if that bullet is live and still contains a viable charge you have indeed “dodged a bullet “ ..


The bullet is expended, (fired) it's just the head of the fired round the detonating cartridge remains in the weapon, it is totally inert, but even this is the case being as it is a metal object it could still have damaged your blade or worse case been flung off by the rotation of your blade on impact , so yes you did dodge a bullet, best engrave your name on it - old saying your safe until the bullet with your name on it gets you - you'd already posses the bullet !


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## stuart little (15 Apr 2022)

bansobaby said:


> You can't legally shoot deer other than muntjac and CWD with .223 calibre in the UK.....


CWD??


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## Jameshow (15 Apr 2022)

Chronic wasting disease - Wikipedia







en.m.wikipedia.org


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## Bingy man (15 Apr 2022)

The irony of getting injured by a bullet that may of been fired many years ago by a gun and all those years later thrown back at you by a woodworking machine.


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## heimlaga (15 Apr 2022)

Those fully jacketed military bullets are a common find in trees pretty much all over Finland. They usually keep their shape when hitting a tree. Modern day hunting bullets mushroom when hiting a tree. Hovever quite a bit of hunting has been done over the years with surplus or smuggled military riffles and squirreled away military munition. A civil war and two wars against Russia and one against Germany have also made some impact.
The Swiss made Vetterli M78 repeating bolt action riffle was a very popular though illegal hunting riffle around here well into the 1950-ies when the munition supply run out. The huge bullets mushroomed (this was before such bullets were forbidden for military use) and made good sized holes through any animal at a fair distance.


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## guineafowl21 (15 Apr 2022)

stuart little said:


> CWD??





Jameshow said:


> Chronic wasting disease - Wikipedia
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Er, no - Chinese water deer


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## pgrbff (15 Apr 2022)

Far less exciting, but I heat a fairly large house with logs, 75ish cm long and up to 20, even 25 cm diameter. Mostly chestnut but some oak and cherry.
I cut and burn probably 10-15 tons a year in a 60kw boiler.
I am always amazed at the number and size of stones and pebbles I find in the ash.


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## dickm (16 Apr 2022)

jcassidy said:


> So I started drilling a hole in the end.... those primers make quite a bang for such a small thing!!!


Lying around somewhere in our house in the 1950s was an old Golden Syrup tin half full of ignition caps for a percussion action shotgun which lived somewhere else in the family. Put one on the vice and hit it; ears were ringing for a good half hour after.


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## Doug71 (16 Apr 2022)

Could have been nasty.

I imagine the scenario where the table saw flings the bullet straight at you, a couple of hours later you are just a chalk mark on the floor with a confused CSI checking for gunshot residue and trying to work out where the shooter was standing 

I have come across lead shot in timber before but nothing as exciting as a bullet.


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## Geriatrix (16 Apr 2022)

Back in the 70's I was working in Iran (pre revolution) but after six years I'd had enough so the company transferred me to South-East Asia living in Singapore and working on a rotation basis in Sumatra. I had only been married for three years so back then we hadn't built up a 40' container of personal effects but simply a wooden crate. For reasons best known to the shipping company the crate made a journey to the UK overland before being put on a ship bound for Singapore. When it finally arrived, it all seemed in good order but on removing our stuff much of it was damaged. Clothing was shredded and various other damaged articles. It just didn't make sense. Finally I reached my stack of LP's built up over many years only to find a shattered record inside the cover. As I removed them from the stack one by one the damage continued but to a gradual lessor extent. After removing about a dozen, I found the problem - A spent .303/7.62 round. Having found that we discovered a few more. All the rounds were steel jacketed lead which I believe was the standard 7.62 NATO round at the time and used world-wide by various weapons.

I wan't too shocked. I had previously met some of the British lorry drivers that plied the route from the UK to and from Teheran. Apparently getting shot up in Asian Turkey was routine especially at night. Generally the vehicles traveled in a small convoy and laid up at night in a populated area or service station. They all held weapons in their cab for self-defense but I never met a driver who had had to engage the "enemy", who were of course trying to disable the lorry to get access to its cargo. 

Fortunately the contents were fully insured and the underwriter was not going to argue with spent rounds as evidence.

Quite the "Wild West" scenario. Oh, how the world has changed in 50 years!


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## bansobaby (19 Apr 2022)

stuart little said:


> CWD??


Chinese Water Deer


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## Jar944 (19 Apr 2022)

Relatively common to find the occasional slug in a board over here. I've never had one damage a knife/blade though


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