I work in a saw mill and that chunk of soft metal is a shotgun slug for sure. People shoot trees.. its a wonder why its so oddly shaped though at least it was lead shot.. that wont hurt your equipment. unless you ran it across a saw stop.
I’ll consider this mystery “confirmed by an expert”. Thanks! “People shoot trees”, HA! And, our equipment was indeed totally unharmed. I still think the edges could’ve been pushed into the odd shape by the tree growing around it for a while.
While squaring up some boards yesterday we found this piece of super soft metal. It seems the tree, most likely chopped down some time in the early 1800s, must have grown around it for a while because the edges were pretty organic. It seems likely to be lead (what other common metal is this soft? In the first picture you can see the wound where we stabbed it with an awl- which went in, as they say, like a hot knife through butter). As usual, I wish I had A Lab, and that we could now Run Some Tests. Justin hypothesizes that, at one point, before the tree mashed it up, the lump was a piece of lead shot. Which calls to mind all sorts of exciting historic possibilities.
