Read weight on old Cannon?

Please help me read the weight mark on this Spanish cannon barrel. It dates from first half 18th C. This is a model, so the barrel only weighs a few pounds if that. The “Ls” on the end is the abbreviation means “Libras” or Spanish pounds. I’m not at liberty to post a photo of the whole item. Not yet anyway.

 

First letters of Spanish numbers? Dos (Quatro?) nueve dos [2492]? Since I have no idea what the original might have weighed, no idea whether this makes any sense.

 

Thanks, could well be as you say, I’d guess a full-sized Spanish 12 pounder bronze gun barrel of similar design to this model might weigh something like that number of Libras, I’ll do some checking. Often model cannon barrels are marked with the actual weight of the model barrel, but then we’d be looking at abbreviations for ounces in Spanish in addition to any full pounds, and the various weight units should be recognizable as separate fields of figures. There’s only one unit given here, Libras.

 

Somebody on another site wrote how 2492 would normally be written out in words and it wouldn’t match those letters. I had a little brainstorm-if the second character was really an ampersand, and considering this thin steel barrel is only 10” long and not solid, letters might stand (in Spanish) for “two & nine-tenths” pounds. I’m trying to figure out why one D has the superscript “s” before it and the other D has the s after it. Any ideas there? I gave an engineer friend the barrel’s dimensions as closely as I could measure from the photos, and he’ll calculate the volume then the weight based on the specific gravity of steel.

 

Didn’t get a number from engineer guy so I calculated the volume of the whole item, subtracted volume of the bore, multiplied by specific gravity of steel, converted to Libras, and got 1.92 lbs. for the weight of the barrel. The “nine-tenths” part agrees with the number I got but I have no idea how the first D would equate to 1. Math error, or some forgotten practice in 18th C. Spain?

 

Short of a serious math error, I used the density of steel, 7.6 g/cm3 as the multiplier for the volume to get that weight which I couldn’t relate to the abbreviations on the cannon. Since I’m taking someone else’s word, which could be a guess, that the whole barrel is made of steel, they could be mistaken. Working backwards, a metal with a density a little over 11 (eleven) g/cm3 would put things in better agreement. Silver, lead, ...?. But the trunnion with the strange weight number on it is almost certainly steel. Both trunnions were likely pressed or screwed or soldered in to make the basic cylindrical tube “much less work” than needing to turn off a large amount of metal. The dolphins were also additions to the basic tube. The big bronze cannons this tiny one represents were cast in one pour; normally nothing on them except perhaps a front sight blade, was added.