Pistol Drops on a Hill

Dusted off the MXT and GPX for a beginning-of-Fall hunt and was rewarded with a nice variety of pistol bullets.  All were at depth with the average probably about 6-8 inches.  What the MXT could not hear, the GPX did.  Note the prominent sprues on the two .54s and the several .45 round balls, a caliber I rarely dig.  Also in the group are eight .45 Bartholows, nine .36 and one .32 conical with a few .36 and .32 round balls in there as well.  Good looking drops.  Unlike last time out, no bee stings but I have to say, the chiggers are still in the pines.

Centreville Museum Restorations

Some, if not all, of these restored plates will be on view at the private Centreville Museum which is becoming (or has become) a huge success.  The CS two-piece required that the wreath be matched to the tongue.  The Script NY only needed the keeper bar straightened.  The Flaming Bomb was applied to the plate.  The clipped corner (buried under the NY) was given a ground dug look as it was splitting in two.  The gutter back frame  buckle was bent and distorted into a parallelogram and was missing the center bar. It was a rough one now straightened and completed.  A nice collection indeed.

Losing Daylight, My Olde Site Produces Again

Well, once again, the federal-era foundation site yields yet another pre-1820 coin. This time, after about two hours of deep digging and as the sun sets and the mosquitoes set upon me, a coin is located in the side wall to make the dig worthwhile. I ran the detector along the upper walls and heard a good signal near where I knew some tin scrap was lying on the surface.  It sounded too good to ignore so I dug into the wall and the coin simply dropped down in front of me as shown in this blurry video.

This is the 13-star variety of the 1817 which is less rare than the 15-star. In 1817, the Mississippi territory was divided into the Mississippi and Alabama territories. The first Seminole War was begun in this year and the first school for the deaf was established in Connecticut. An interesting year.

Two-Piece CS Cavalry Buckle Restoration

Here's a challenge. From a broken CS tongue and broken CS wreath, create one buckle that looks to be the original as-dug item. The pictures tell the sequence for this work. What is not included is the color matching techniques and the methods used to simulate ground action and oxidation. The CS disc and the keeper to be joined are period relics but did not come together. The keeper to be married to the wreath is from a reproduction. So we have three Civil War period relic pieces and one repro piece put together to make one complete relic.




Brass is filed away using a dremel then hand filed for exactness in order to install a bridge. In this repair it will be a brass shim.



A shim is fabricated from brass and placed in the notch created in the filing in the previous step. It is glued in place and brass filings are used to fill the voids while creating "ground" texture at the same time. It is filed flush with the surrounding surfaces.



The wreath's keeper is made from a reproduction buckle but has to be filed to the same dimensions as the tongue's keeper. Additionally, a section is cut away so that it can be married with the existing bar still part of the wreath. Shims are made and inserted into notches to provide strength.



To match the two pieces I have opted to go with the coloration of the CS tongue and use various powders and fixatives to get the wreath to match the tongue.

In the final steps, I tweak the hi-points with earth tones and the recesses with lighter "sand tones" to get some variation and contrast so that the relic has depth and doesn't appear flat all the while attempting to keep the relic looking fairly original to how it looked prior to my work.



If this buckle interests you it is for sale at this time. However, as part of the sale, the purchaser must sign agreement that any future movement (sale) of this item must be accompanied with full disclosure of the repairs performed including these pictures which I will include with the relic.

Probing:Soda Bottle

Using the probe, I located yet another soldier's hut and fire pit at depth but was only able to recover the broken remains of some small medicine bottles and this Philadelphia soda shown reconstructed along with an unbroken example (internet file). The manufacturer, E.Roussel, was the first to go to this style of bottle in order to distinguish his product from competitors.

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1806 Large Cent Recovery

Found this nicely detailed large cent today. Condition is excellent save for the period scratches across liberty's face. She was four feet down at the deepest level of a federal-era cellar hole and exactly what I had hoped to find.

1806 was the year Lewis & Clark returned from their expedition having set out in 1804. Imagine, unexplored territory in the US.

US Buckle Upgrade