Almost certainly started life as a rifle bullet . 0.375" is the calibre for a Winchester or several other hunting rifles.

Why the groove – to hang from a cord as a trophy?

Definitely a bullet that someone has taken a hacksaw to. Dave W

Many years ago I visited a house locally (norfolk) and was shown a bucket well filled with bullets, most if not all were 1/2" machine gun and armour piercing ! I was given some and told to skim off the front, pointy bit, brass, remove the lubricant, lead, and then use as a dot punch ! 30 years later I'm still using them, they don't go blunt ! The ones with a small hole in the blunt end were tracer rounds ! Where had they come from ? The gunnery ranges at Snettisham Beach, IF you want something larger go to Holme beach – still littered with 6Lber shells ! Noel.

Agreed 'tis a bullet by all appearances, but an odd one.

From the shape you might call it a boattailed spire point. But most spire point bullets are softnosed hunting projectiles and usually short, light and flatbased to allow a high velocity and flat trajectory over shortish ranges with light recoil – for smaller targets, sometimes 'varmints'.

This ain't none o' those things. It's got to weigh about 300 grains, and if those rifling marks (note the left-hand twist) are real – they're not especially clear in either pic – then it's been fired into something providing very light and uniform resistance to bring it to a halt without severe scoring and/or distortion. .303 full metal jackets typically bend double or even snap in two in range sandtraps as they topple and try to turn over under deceleration. Perhaps this particular bullet flew a full trajectory in air and only hit the ground spent with little energy remaining.

Left hand twist is a characteristic of 303 and some other British calibres of late C19 and early C20 – I don't know whether Holland and Holland used it in their .375" Magnum big-game rifles, but I doubt a modern (almost certainly US or perhaps Czech) maker would do so.

Is there anything hard, like tungsten carbide, at the bottom of that saw cut?

Edited By Mick B1 on 05/03/2022 14:00:05

Something soft to slow it down, water!

Might the slot be the result of a hacksaw being used to release it from the propellant case ? Noel.

Possibly experimentally test fired in a lab to avoid damage, perhaps to confirm bullets weren't being mangled inside the barrel. The saw cut might be part of an investigation, though I don't see any reason for it.

Dave

No chance. 1879. Brass-cartridge, breech-loading rifles were in use, but blunt round-nosed, paper-patched lead slugs of .450" calibre and upwards – and the brass was rolled foil 'n' coil, not solid-drawn. Nothing like the bullet shown.

But Derek Lane could be right – oddly, my phone shows the OP pics more clearly than my monitor, and they could be extraction scores from pulling the bullet. There are a few ways of doing that without mangling the ogive and bearing surface with pliers. I'm wondering if the hacksaw cut allowed the case body to be broken away, and the bullet was then driven from the remains of the neck by a punch from behind, into a 3/8" drilled hole to retain the the neck

There's an MTAC 352 grain match bullet that looks quite a lot like it, but that has a tiny hollow point (not intended for expansion) whereas this one looks to have a small spherical rad on the nose. I think it's a pretty modern target bullet.

Edited By Mick B1 on 05/03/2022 17:30:42

Regards to the groove round the base of the bullet. I have a couple of inert .303 bullets ammunition and both of the bullets have a groove near the base. As regards to the boat tail if you Google ".303 inch Ball Mark VI to VIIIz & L1A1" you will find an explanation. I vaguely remember reading that .303 machine gun rounds for aircraft had a boat tail end and should not be fired in .303 rifles as the charge was too powerful.

Hope this is useful.

I thought it departed from G7 profile in that the pointy bit ahead of the bearing surface, or most of it, appears to be a simple cone, not the G7's 10-calibre radius. That's why I called it a spire point. I think it's more modern than early C20 and may be quite recent, as interest in long bullets with high sectional density for long-range target shooting seems (to me at any rate) to have developed more strongly in the last 20 or 30 years.

In a normal-weight rifle in .375 H&H, it's likely to produce fierce recoil.

AP could be a possibility. It's why I asked about the hacksaw cut – maybe the saw-wielder came up against the tail of a hard core and gave up.

But hey, even if I knew that, it wouldn't really give a definitive ID. American bullet-makers like Speer produce TC-cored heavy game bullets in .375", but they're not for long-range use and don't look much like that one.

Agreed. I should have mentioned the Berger Wiki source says recent (circa 2009) match bullets deviate from G7 form. Just guessing, but as the technology available for measuring ballistics has improved vastly over the last 30 years, it's likely bullets have been tweaked since the G series were defined.

Ballistics are another interesting aspect of technology I don't have time to explore. Shame, for a few quid it's fairly easy to measure the velocity of a bullet at home with an Arduino. High-speed motion photography is still too expensive for amateur bodgers, but prices are dropping! Of course doing home ballistics in the UK requires the legalities to be met: no second amendment sophistries here!

Dave