Is it possible to freeze your cojones off?

[Quercus]

@Francis_Vaughan

The explanation also doesn’t hold water from simple physics. The coefficient of expansion of brass is 0.00185% per degree K whilst cast iron is roughly half that. So a brass frame will shrink faster than the iron balls it holds, but the difference is such that the frame would shrink relative to the balls by only about 0.1% over a one hundred degree K range. Which is vastly wider than even the most desperate desert heat to Arctic cold. The idea that a brass frame would shrink enough to affect its geometry holding cannon balls is just fanciful.

Right. I was bored and did the calculation before I read the above post. Going from a 100 degree F tropical desert to a 0 degree F ‘about to be trapped in pack ice’ moment, you’d see the hole in a brass holder for a 5 inch cannonball shrink by something like 1/20th of an inch. Since the iron ball is also shrinking (not quite as quickly), the clearance between the iron and brass shrinks by about 1/50th of an inch. Which could just conceivably become an issue in some modern machinery with parts moving past each other at extremely tight tolerances. But cannonballs in the era of sail were not made with 1/50th of an inch tolerances (it’s well-attested that before battle sailors would use hand tools chip the rust and bumps off of cannonballs). And then even if they were, I don’t think a sailor who was trying to fire his guns as fast as possible would want to have to pull his ammunition out of a rack that had 1/50th of an inch clearance.

[Irishman]

But if you stack them in a pyramid, so that the effects are cummulative, how many cannonballs do you have to have stacked across the bottom row before the effect ads up to anything remotely reasonable? 4? 12? 20? 375?