OH head stamp king!!!

DiggerMD

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Sep 21, 2017
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South Ga..
Any I?D. On this? It's solid brass, 2" long
 

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I'm no headstamp king, but I am from OH :laughing: It looks like it might be from the Frankford Arsenal, potentially a pretty early cartridge. It might help to post a pic of the length of the cartridge, also.

Frankford used the "F" stamp at the 12 o'clock position, but apparently only prior to WWI. After that they switched to "F A". The other numbers would indicate date of manufacture, but usually the year is 2 digits.

Here's a site that has some examples from the 1890s: http://www.oldammo.com/november04.htm

You can compare your overall cartridge to the pics. If you scroll down to the second picture, the headstamps look similar to yours. For example, there's one stamped F 9 88 indicating it was made in Sept 1888. Wikipedia has some info as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankford_Arsenal), and they mention that a F 2 12 stamp would mean it was made in Feb 1912. It's odd yours only has one digit numbers though, unless the "F 2 8" means Feb 1908, and they just didn't bother with the "0" in front of the 8 (is there a faint number after the 8 that I'm not seeing in the pic?). Or it means the cartridge is something else entirely, and I'm completely wrong :lol:
 
I'm no headstamp king, but I am from OH :laughing: It looks like it might be from the Frankford Arsenal, potentially a pretty early cartridge. It might help to post a pic of the length of the cartridge, also.

Frankford used the "F" stamp at the 12 o'clock position, but apparently only prior to WWI. After that they switched to "F A". The other numbers would indicate date of manufacture, but usually the year is 2 digits.

Here's a site that has some examples from the 1890s: http://www.oldammo.com/november04.htm

You can compare your overall cartridge to the pics. If you scroll down to the second picture, the headstamps look similar to yours. For example, there's one stamped F 9 88 indicating it was made in Sept 1888. Wikipedia has some info as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankford_Arsenal), and they mention that a F 2 12 stamp would mean it was made in Feb 1912. It's odd yours only has one digit numbers though, unless the "F 2 8" means Feb 1908, and they just didn't bother with the "0" in front of the 8 (is there a faint number after the 8 that I'm not seeing in the pic?). Or it means the cartridge is something else entirely, and I'm completely wrong :lol:

I looked pretty hard with a magnifying glass and don't see a second number. There is a scratch next to it but I can't tell that it was ever a number. But either way I'm in the 1800's club so I'm happy.
 
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