Imbedded shot

[Hank Knight]

Look what I found today while dressing some walnut.

2BD1A140-76FD-4FDC-9032-1A7970EE926D by Hank Knight, on Flickr

I thought if I ever hit a bullet or shot with my SawStop, it would trigger the safety shutoff, but it didn't happen. Looks to be two #4 or #6 shot and a #4 buckshot. Wonder how they came to be so close together in the same tree.

[FloridaRetiree]

In a 3 decade history that has happen to me a couple times and should be aware of in privately purchased lumber.

[Cecil]

I thought if I ever hit a bullet or shot with my SawStop, it would trigger the safety shutoff, but it didn't happen. Looks to be two #4 or #6 shot and a #4 buckshot. Wonder how they came to be so close together in the same tree.

Saw Stop triggers on conductivity.  The shot was fully surrounded by an insulator.  Wet wood (i.e. treated lumber) looses its insulation properties.

[Steve N]

It's the devil on Planer/Jointer knives, kinda cool to see though. I think this has been my issue with Saw Stop is lack of expectation vs reality. It makes a good case to use guards with them.

[Tapper]

It's the devil on Planer/Jointer knives, kinda cool to see though. I think this has been my issue with Saw Stop is lack of expectation vs reality. It makes a good case to use guards with them.

?

DT

[jteneyck]

I'll bet those are all the same size shot; they likely penetrated to different depths in the wood.  Then when the blade cut through them the exposed diameters are different. 

I cut through a rifled slug with my chainsaw mill.  No damage.  I hit a fairly large bullet with my planer, too, in a piece of commercial wood.  Thankfully, that one was lead, too, and didn't hurt the knives at all.  So that's two in 30 years or so of cutting wood.  

John

[Dave Diaman]

I guess I just must be unlucky. I have found so many lead slugs in wood I have lost count. Lead is fine as long as I don’t hit metal. They have almost all been in walnut too. Given the size of most of the lead slugs I have found and the age of the trees I suspect a lot were musket balls. They were simply to big to be buck shot and too close to the center of the tree to have been put there in the last 100 years. Of the odd things I have found one of the coolest finds I ever had was a whole walnut. I cut right through the center of a walnut that had fallen into the crotch of the tree and the tree grew around it somehow. I filled the nut with clear epoxy and left it. The customer loved it and said the walnut made it a real conversation piece. It was part of a built in bar and everyone who visits the bar gets the story about the walnut and how old the tree was that it came from.

[Stwood_]

Back in the day when I had the woodmizer, I cut all kinds of stuff. Many bullets, nails, barb wire, insulators (<---the worst), snakes.
I too have a full walnut nut that fell in the crotch and got encased as the tree grew. I sawed the nut in half.
I have that board hanging on the wall here.

[wood-chips]

Lucky it was lead and not metal cased bullets.
My brother and I put more that a few rounds in the trees at granddads place

[Steve N]

Lucky it was lead and not metal cased bullets.
My brother and I put more that a few rounds in the trees at granddads place

Back in the day, if it came from a gun it was almost always soft lead. Since the 90's shotgun pellets have gravitated to steel shot, and now a mix of metals with Tungsten  and other materials are being used after waterfowlers using "steel only" shot complain of much more wounding, which would lead to a greater loss of waterfowl than used to be poisoned in shallow waters with lead. Rifle bullets are also being ruled out for a variety of reasons in favor of copper, and copper jacketed rounds. This article was from December 2013 I guess if you hit a bullet or shot and it was soft lead, may be drawing quickly to a close. Whatever you encounter as new will be on the outer edge of a tree, and sawyers will take much out initially. Soon enough these newer shots will be buried into what is left for us as lumber.

Hank? Did you run a metal detector on them? You would need to cover them with a thin slice of wood, against a test subject you can then determine if it "detects" as ferrous, or doesn't so much as non ferrous metals. Also spherical in shape, and coming in various diameters are nails, much harder, and infinitely more damaging to cutters. The items shown in Hank's pics likely are lead, due to absence of a rust ring, but that doesn't start on day one, and if closer to the bark may not be much of an indicator.

"Non-Ferrous metal is non-magnetic metals (copper, aluminum, brass, lead, etc.) It will take approximately 50% more of a non-ferrous metal to be as detectable as a ferrous metal. Manganese is also a non-ferrous metal and difficult for most metal detectors to detect."