looks a nice grenade.
looks a nice grenade.
Wow, that's quite a find (and quite dangerous) for a 10 year old. I'm glad you had your wits about you not to mess with them.
I really envy you folks in Europe getting to visit these battlegrounds, and those in a position to look for relics and help make sure the forgotten fallen soldiers can be taken to a proper burial. I can only imagine how much the experience connects you to the events and brings them to life.
Yes It is quite something for my children to hear these stories.
I moved to the area I was born after my working years and found the neighboring farmer still had 25 pdr casings that were fired from his yard to to the neighboring village during the fighting to liberate The Netherlands by the Highland Division in 1944. They would have been fired by SP's. He said his father saw tanks firing from his yard. Bishops?
Cheers,
Emile
This grenade arrived today! Interesting to say the least. I've never held a grenade of any type before.
I'm going to post pictures here later tonight, but the first order of business is to verify 100% that this is inert and no danger. I have a kid in the house, and I just can't take any chances on previous assessments that it is without making sure myself. Can anyone help me with what to look for to verify it's been correctly rendered safe?
Thanks guys with any help you can offer on this. Safety is of top importance to me on acquiring these.
Edit: Looking inside, I discovered where someone has drilled a kidney bean sized hole into the wall that would have went around the detonator and fuse on the inside. I presume that was made to flush out the explosive? The body of the grenade isn't very heavy, it weighs 2.72 oz without the fuse screwed on. Put together, it weighs 3.64 oz.
Last edited by avenger; 09-04-2015 at 01:38 AM.
Here are the in hand photos. On the last shot, I tried to get a look down inside the grenade's fuse slot. You can see a channel drilled into the inside of the grenade (the hole towards the bottom), and the metal kind of bent inward inside the detonator housing. Either the blue cap is not original to the grenade, or the fuse is not original as the string has the remnants of a fuse pull still attached to it. It doesn't look like these were made tied to the fuse pull, but looped through it, so I could easily just remove the remnant and loop it through the fuse on the grenade and nobody would ever tell the difference. The fuse cap and the grenade both are dated 1943, so they match pretty well otherwise.
I believe the grenade is probably fully inert since it's been drilled into, and weighs a lot less than the online 12oz figure for original weight. I don't know how they make these inert, but part of me still thinks it's never fully safe if there is any remaining explosive that wasn't removed. Though, research seems to indicate TNT (the main base of the mixture these were filled with) will turn to a syrup like liquid when heated, so maybe they heat them and drain them? It also sounds like TNT is pretty stable, and typically requires a detonator to explode, so there's less of a worry about spontaneous explosions than with old dynamite. That's probably more info than anyone wanted.
In any case, I'd still love to hear your thoughts on any considerations or other things to look for, as I want to be completely safe with this.
Hope you like it!
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