IJA Water Canteen Repainted and Snout Question

[feldgrau33]

Hello gents,


A couple of days ago, i manage to got this water canteen dated 1941.
Although it's only the bottle left (a norm in here), but there's some interesting things i found in here.


The first one, the canteen seems to be repainted with dark red color.


The second one, when i compared with my other canteen, the hole snout diameter of this canteen is a bit longer than my older canteen.

2.65-2.7 cm.


2.5 cm.

So my question is, is there any policy of repainting the water canteen in the IJA? Second, is the snout hole diameter between canteens is different each other e.g. no standardization? And third, is there anyone can identify the maker of this canteen?
Thank you.

[Wagriff]

Tell me you really meant to say "Spout" and not "Snout"? lol

[feldgrau33]

Ah yes that's what i meant.

[Nick Komiya]

The marking you ask about is called the Tsuru-Maru Mark (ツルマル印）, the logo of the Japan Aluminum Company that was in business until 2012. They have merged into another company and no longer produce household items, but if you put the Japanese words into Google, you will see many items with that logo.

Yes, the IJA repainted canteens routinely and my canteen article explains how they stripped the paint and also shows the repair kit to take out dents, etc before repainting. Troops were supplied with paint for that purpose, but your example obviously used the wrong paint, as that is the paint you see on the metal fittings like the buckles on the web strap.

Regarding the diameter of the mouth, this too I showed what the correct spec was in the form of a drawing in the canteen story. The spec drawing I used from the B-spec canteen was dated July 13th 1942, at which time, the correct mouth diameter was 25 mm, as shown below. I am too lazy to find out what the permissible production tolerance was for dimensions, but the weight tolerance was 5%, so if we borrowed that, the maximum allowed would have been 26.25 mm. In that sense, 27 mm would not have been accepted by the Army in 1942, if that was how the factory made it.

There can be 2 possible explanations for the larger hole size. One is related to how they stripped paint. If they used Sodium Hydroxide and soaked the canteen in it too long, it melts the metal. Another possibility can simply be that the two canteens you have are from different spec periods. Even for the B-spec canteen in the drawing, they had a 1939 and 1941 spec preceding it, so the mouth size could have been different before. A B-spec canteen is one employing an alloy containing only 9.75% aluminum, taken from scrap introduced in 1939.

The A-spec Type 99 shell after introduction in 1930 went through further 3 spec revisions until 1943, but all the old specs do not remain on record, so it is not possible to say what changed. The only way is to check and compare examples from before and after each spec revision date.

The logo and mouth specs attached below

[feldgrau33]

Ah thank you very much! I tried to search that logo but no avail.

I see, i guess there's possibilty the indonesian who repainted after the war.

Thank you again for the detailed explanation. Really appreciate it.
I wonder, is there any possibility you can identify all of the water canteen marking stamp? I see there's some unknown mark in some example in this forum.

[Nick Komiya]

I probably can identify more, but it is just not worth the trouble for me. Knowing which company a logo belonged to has very little significance for me in the overall scheme of things.

The most systematic way to do it is to pick out the aluminum manufacturers from the army supplier lists and tie those names to logos. Suppliers changed over time, so you have to comb through several lists for such an exercise.