TOPIC:

Hi everyone, I’m a new member to this forum and I’m hoping someone can help me with some information to identify some artefacts that I collected when I was a kid. I was born in Durban and my father was a battlefield fanatic and a tour guide for a short while. He took me to pretty much every battlefield on the eastern side of South African for the Boer-zulu war, Anglo-zulu and Anglo Boer wars. Amazing memories!!
As a kid I naturally found lots of rusty metal on the ground and have cherished these artefacts ever since. I’m now going through it all and would like to know if someone could give me the exact proportions of the Mauser bullet head and the Lee-Medford/Enfield bullet ?
I’ve got several and half are slightly longer and thicker than the others. So my guess is that they correspond to the two types of round that were used by either the brits or the boers.
Any help will be most appreciated and I can then correctly label them in my display cabinet.
Many thanks, Mike

Mikemaddams
Welcome to the Forum. During the ABW, the .303" round and that of the 7mm M93 Mauser fired projectiles (bullets) with round noses. The diameter of a fired, undistorted .303" projectile would be about .312" and the weight 215 grains. The Mauser projectile, undistorted, would measure about .280" and weighed 174 grains. A fast way of ID'ing one from another is to use a magnet. The .303" projectile had a lead core and a cupro-nickel jacket. The 7mm Mauser projectile had a lead core - however the jacket would be steel. Yet another point of difference is that the .303" projectile had a cannelure (groove) around the base and the 7mm did not..
Don't forget that in the early stages of the conflict, the Boers sometimes used commercial .303" rounds loaded with a a variety of soft nosed (sporting) projectile.
Regards
IL. .

Here is a plate showing the different types of projectile in use during the ABW (3. Mauser; 7. Lee-Metford)


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Thank you so much for such a detailed answer! I shall do some investigating now into which are which.

This is great! Thank you

Mike, the simplest way to tell them apart is that the 7mm Mauser bullet, being a lead core and steel jacket, rusts in Natal. The .303, being a lead core and nickel jacket, corrodes to a green-brown colour but it clearly isn't rusty.
In the Free State it's harder to tell at a glance because there's so little rusting.
By the way, my practice nowadays is to log by GPS and re-bury everything I find, as its GPS location is the most valuable information.
If you have a few fired .303 bullets to compare, you can see how many have 5-grooved Enfield rifling vs 7 grooved Metford rifling. I won't tell you what I find, but let's see what you find!
Rob