A change in the stamp format occurs with the move to Snider bullet manufacture: the broad arrows on the cavity rim are removed and a single broad arrow is added to the cavity stamp. The tendency for clay plugs to remain in place, being unaffected by decay, means that there are fewer Snider cavity stamps available to study, unless one is prepared to dig out (thereby destroying) the clay plug. It will be noticed that the rifling of the Snider rifle leaves much less of an impact on the interior of the cavity. With the P53 Enfield bullets, the cavities are ‘swaged’ to the shape of the three or five groove rifling. The five groove Snider rifling hardly affects the cavity at all and the point at which the clay plug can be seen to have halted its progress (represented by the step in the cavity visible in the images below) is often circular.
Stamp 1
Stamp 2
Stamp 3
Stamp 4
The stamp on the left features a ‘4’ rotated 90 degrees to the right.
Stamp 5
Stamp 7
The broad arrow on the right example is missing its central stem.
Broad arrow only
There appears to be no number associated with this off-centre broad arrow.
base cavity stamps
