This is kind of a funny, unusual event that happened to me 8-10 years ago.

An elderly friend had an old mobile home dating back to the 1950s that she had rented to numerous people over the years. She was under pressure from the county she lived in to get rid of it. She asked me to go through it and clean out anything that was somewhat valuable.

I did find a reasonable amount of pennies and nickels thrown under the bed. At least enough to interest our son in flipping the bed and picking them up.

There was also a stack of old Playboy magazines, various bullets, loose in a drawer and a pineapple type hand grenade in an old dusty hiddy hole in a closet. The hand grenade was the real deal. I carried it in my truck for a few days until I could line up a time to meet with local LE to get rid of it. Getting rid of a hand grenade is not easy. I finally met with a deputy sherriff, showed it to him and he immediately backed off, called his supervisor and gave me a police escort to a big open field where I place it on an old tractor bumper. My county is a rural county. They had about as much trouble finding someone to take it as I did. There was a city in a county nearby that had a bomb disposal trailer. It was a big cylinder, mounted on a steel plate with what looked like automotive springs underneath.

When the bomb squad and the newspaper reporters showed up, I left. I figured I did my civic duty and didn't need the ATF on my case.

There was an article with a picture of it in the weekly newspaper in my county. Thankfully, I left before they could get any pictures of me.

I'd have dug a deep post hole on my place and dropped it in it without pulling the pin. Who knows what the timing might be after all those years?

Make sure pin is in good.

Check to see if it is solid or open base.

Previous information in this section of my post removed to satisfy my conscience in case someone did it wrong.

May be just a novelty "Pineapple Grenade" that was sold back when.

By the by, IF one ever comes across a real one, don't pull the pin and throw it. One never knows if he delay that is normally there will still be there and zero second delay is likely to be a problem for one's soft body parts . . . well bones too.

quote:

Originally posted by TCLouis:
Make sure pin is in good.

Check to see if it is solid or open base.

Unscrew the fuze!

Check to see if it even has explosive in it.


May be just a novelty "Pineapple Grenade" that was sold back when.

I thought about the novelty probability. I remember seeing these in an Army surplus store a long time ago. Those surplus ones had the bottom drilled out. The one I found didn't have the bottom drilled out plus the pin and fusing mechanism seemed appropriate. The Sheriff thought it could be real or someone could have made a home made one with gunpowder and fused it.
At any rate the bomb squad reported blew it up with C4, or white phosphorus are the like. Their bomb trailer was very impressive. The cylinder was about 3 ft in diameter with approx. 6" walls, stood about 30" high (30" barrel) with what looked like a one foot steel plate on the bottom to direct any blast upward.

Anyway, kind of anticlimactic since they hauled it away without exploding it at the site. Must have their own special range.

It's amazing what the GIs of WWII brought home.
One of my WWII vintage chums came in the office with a bag like you get at a dept store.
I finished up with my client and followed hime back in the coffee room. We howdy'd and got the low down on families and such. I asked Bill what was in bag, it looked heavy.
He allowed that he had three hand grenades. Which tweeked my interest. I asked where he got them. Seems a widow lady wanted him to clean out her husband,s work shop and these toys were on a shelf behind some boxes.
I checked all three there was no hole drilled in the bottom, the pins were still in place. I unscrewed the lever fuse and checked for powder, they were empty.
Two were usable and one had the fuse burned. All three were empty of powder. two were ready for a handful of Bullseye.
I suggested that he call the State Police to send their bomb people to come get them after advising the state police they were inert, mostly.

Jim

One of my uncles found an expended 20mm projectile near Camp Wolters after WWII.

He took it home and carried it around a while.
One day he dropped it off the front porch of the old farm house on to a rock. The projectile exploded and blew some boards out under the porch and put 2 holes in the family car.

quote:

By the by, IF one ever comes across a rel one, don't pull the pin an throw it. One never knows if he delay that is normally there will still be there and zero second delay is likely to be a problem for soft body parts

+1

Indeed some British 36 grenades were deliberately altered as booby traps by interfering with the length of the fuse.

In theory once you unscrew the bases and take the cap and its fuse out (on a British 36) the thing is safe.

I am guessing that a US grenade is similar?

Long ago when I lived in Bryan,Tx.there's a creek that runs more or less between Bryan and College Station. Some kids were playing in the creek bottom and found a metal object and brought it home. Kid's dad recognized it as a Jap grenade, the handle was rotted off and the pin was missing. Apparently the firing pin was rusted in place. Called the Bryan cops, officer came out, put it on the back seat of his car, and took it to the station where he sandbagged it under the shift sergeant's desk. That went over well. Ft. Hood EOD came out and hauled it off, reported that it definitely was live. Sure am glad nobody dropped the thing! GW

First, foremost, and always upon discovering unexploded or questionable ordnance:

LEAVE IT ALONE !

Then move away, isolate the area, mark around it as required to keep others away. Then report it to law enforcement.

It doesn't matter how old it is, where it has been sitting, how many times it was moved, or if it has been damaged. Even "trench art" and things like paperweights and souvenir lamps still containing live ordnance have been known to explode after years of handling.

The number of people killed by "harmless" ordnance or war trophies is chilling.

quote:

Originally posted by Grenadier:
First, foremost, and always upon discovering unexploded or questionable ordnance:

LEAVE IT ALONE !

Then move away, isolate the area, mark around it as required to keep others away. Then report it to law enforcement.

It doesn't matter how old it is, where it has been sitting, how many times it was moved, or if it has been damaged. Even "trench art" and things like paperweights and souvenir lamps still containing live ordnance have been known to explode after years of handling.

The number of people killed by "harmless" ordnance or war trophies is chilling.

Did you see a question in my post looking for advice?

With comments like:

"pineapple type hand grenade ... I carried it in my truck for a few days"

"I'd have dug a deep post hole on my place and dropped it in"

"Unscrew the fuze! Check to see if it even has explosive in it."

"I unscrewed the lever fuse"

and considering these posts may be seen by thousands of people,

advice seemed sorely needed.


The old phrase goes, "There are many old demo men and there are many bold demo men. But there aren't too many old, bold demo men."

Available answers to my question are A) yes or B) no, If I want lectures from an internet x-spurt seeking the intellectual high ground I'll ask.

My responses were not directed toward you but to the AR community in general. After all, you did post on a public forum.

Nevertheless, you need not concern yourself with my opinion nor advice. Certainly, you may choose to play with any UXO and DMM you may find. Best regards and good luck.

My ex-brother-in-law does estate sales. About the time he and my sister got a divorce, he did a sale in Henrietta Texas. Now he knows a lot about antiques but nothing about firearms or anything related. He climbed up in the attic, picked up a paper sack and started back down the ladder. Well the bottom fell out of the sack and three live grenades hit the floor and rolled around the kitchen. The big dummy picked them up, put them in another sack and put them back in the attic. The divorce was nearly finalized right then.

quote:

Originally posted by Grenadier:
With comments like:

"pineapple type hand grenade ... I carried it in my truck for a few days"

"I'd have dug a deep post hole on my place and dropped it in"

"Unscrew the fuze! Check to see if it even has explosive in it."

"I unscrewed the lever fuse"

and considering these posts may be seen by thousands of people,

advice seemed sorely needed.


The old phrase goes, "There are many old demo men and there are many bold demo men. But there aren't too many old, bold demo men."

Some of us don't see the sense in a)appearing on the ATF's radar, even if they had nothing to do with the explosive and b)spending thousands of dollars of local money to handle a problem that can easily and safely be handled on one's own.

I grew up when you could walk into the corner hardware store and buy dynamite. These days a frigging stray lunch box clears three blocks and brings out the robots for an old tuna sandwich. I guess I'm just not as scary as some people.

I would as a first move unscrew the fuze assembly and separate it from the "pineapple" part of the grenade.

At that point you are dealing with the striker/spoon assembly,
the delay element and a blasting cap.

The explosive pineapple is relatively safe as the explosives used as bursting charges are relatively stable and hard to initiate even when relatively old and stored outside of ideal storage conditions

Old blasting caps scare the piss out of me.
Old primacord depending on composition can be nearly as malicious... OLD PETN based priamcord can go off just from flexing it, the PETN tends to recrystallize into less stable forms if not stored correctly

So the general idea is seperate the potentially unstable initiators from the "power element"

If you feel Brave and/or bold bending the blasting cap to the side will cause it to snap off, that you drop in a deep hole

(Bend it back and forth the way you bend a 22lr round to pry it off of the bullet)

You can then pull the pin and let the spoon fly, keeping your hand away from where you broke off the cap,

No, I never worked EOD, I worked for a subcontractor that made fuze assemblies and probably have burned more striker/delay elements than any busload of long term army veterans, I can say this with some confidence because I worked in quality control and got the job of destroying all the "Rejects", as well as being the guy on the production floor that made all the "Specials" (Short delay and ZERO delay)

I also assembled mortar fuzes that would explode at the bottom of the tube and others that would go off when the safety wire was pulled (With the rocket at the top of the tube before it was dropped.

The point of all this is to make it incredibly dangerous to steal mortar rounds or grenades in a conflict area, because the supplies can be intentionally salted with booby-trapped
ordinance.

If any of several elite forces have operated in an area I would be real suspicious of anything found in the area afterwards.

Ever see what a 5.56 cartridge completely filled with PETN will do to an M4 Carbine, not to mention the guy attempting to fire that carbine?

I know there were similar cartridges in 5.45X39 and 7.62X39 prepared the same way, I can assure you a 7.62x39 case filled with PETN will turn an AK into a widely scattered debris field and the AK's operator into "Stir-fry"

I'd tell you how those "Specials' were marked but that has undoubtedly changed in the 20+ years since I worked on that stuff.

Back then I received a complement from a US army psychological warfare officer that he considered the highest possible complement: "You are one SICK Son of a Bitch!"

There were stringent in-house security protocols on handling and packaging "Specials" to prevent them from inadvertently getting into the normal ordinance supply chain.

It is some of my expert handiwork of the early 1990's that EOD people are afraid of interacting with.

Though What I spent the most time doing was certifying quality control on Spin-decay Fuze assemblies for anti-aircraft projectiles.

The sign over my workbench read "what goes up only comes back down if we screw-up"

As for the 20mm cannon projectile 20mm rounds have a simple rather sensitive impact fuze I have several disarmed ones in my collection
(WW2 German rounds that have been carefully cleaned of all explosives)
20mm cannon rounds other than solid shot used for training, are dangerous enough that if you see someone handling a loose round find something to hide behind, remember they are designed to go off when striking relatively thin aluminum sheet.

as for that rusted Japanese grenade mentioned above the striking spring was likely rusted into dust as well.


Years ago someone found one of their grandfather's old toys, a Thermite grenade.
These are technically an incendiary device, not an explosive I got rid of it by letting it do what it was designed to do, start a fire...

a big pile of stumps soaked with a 50/50 mix of gasoline and Diesel fuel even so I didn't simply pull the pin and throw it. I straightened out the pin and yanked on it with
a 40foot length od mono-filament line...

Thermite pre-ignitor compositions are unfriendly mixtures to my skin.


AD

Allan, that may very well be the most interesting post I have ever read on the AR Forums. Thank you!

Thermite ? we metallurgists use it to weld not destroy ! One fellow loved it ,when the LST he was on , in mid-Pacific ,split the main deck side to side .They repaired it with thermite welding !!

quote:

Originally posted by deltam:
This is kind of a funny, unusual event that happened to me 8-10 years ago.

An elderly friend had an old mobile home dating back to the 1950s that she had rented to numerous people over the years. She was under pressure from the county she lived in to get rid of it. She asked me to go through it and clean out anything that was somewhat valuable.

I did find a reasonable amount of pennies and nickels thrown under the bed. At least enough to interest our son in flipping the bed and picking them up.

There was also a stack of old Playboy magazines, various bullets, loose in a drawer and a pineapple type hand grenade in an old dusty hiddy hole in a closet. The hand grenade was the real deal. I carried it in my truck for a few days until I could line up a time to meet with local LE to get rid of it. Getting rid of a hand grenade is not easy. I finally met with a deputy sherriff, showed it to him and he immediately backed off, called his supervisor and gave me a police escort to a big open field where I place it on an old tractor bumper. My county is a rural county. They had about as much trouble finding someone to take it as I did. There was a city in a county nearby that had a bomb disposal trailer. It was a big cylinder, mounted on a steel plate with what looked like automotive springs underneath.

When the bomb squad and the newspaper reporters showed up, I left. I figured I did my civic duty and didn't need the ATF on my case.

There was an article with a picture of it in the weekly newspaper in my county. Thankfully, I left before they could get any pictures of me.

Thankfully you did leave before they got pictures of you, do you really think we want to see pictures of an idiot and yes you sure did your civic duty by driving around with a live grenade in your truck for a few days.

Grenadier's advice is very sound. As others posted, many people including children get themselves killed or badly injured every year by handling live ordinance.

Your post was not funny particularly when followed with your smart reply to Grenadier's post. FWIW and it won't matter to you anyway, poor judgement in my book.

quote:

nearby

UXO kills more folks than actually using the stuff....

Same rules apply- don't touch anything you weren't issued from the supply point-mark it, secure the perimeter (HGs usually have a lethal radius of about 5 m, but are dangerous out to 50m.), report it and guard it until engineers or EOD arrive.

quote:

Old blasting caps scare the piss out of me.

That's what you're dealing with, if you unscrew the fuse assembly.

Dad was on the "other side" during WWll, a 20 mm anti aircraft gun in Holland. Told the story of being in a bunker below their gun, when they heard a loud bang. Turned out the guy on duty above, had been playing with a 20 mm round, which detonated. Good bye fingers.

Grizz

just pull the pin, flip the spoon, and throw it at somebody you don't like. It's not like they can get any prints off of it or anything...

I would have taken it out and put it a 100 yards away and shot it.

Many years ago I found an unexploded bomb.

It was in the area where our air force used to practice bombing, miles away from town on the beach.

I had some small caliber rifles, and thought it would be fun to blow it up.

Sat it on the beach, and got a good distance from it, and shot it several times, nothing happened.

In those days the largest caliber I had was a 375H&H, but that was at home.

Well, this was an opportunity not to be missed.

So off I went back home, got my 375H&H and some solid ammo.

What a great disappointment it was when I shot it.

I was expecting a great big explosion.

Instead all I got was a stream of smoke from the bullet home!!

It was a smoke bomb!

Stop. Don't touch. Leave the area. Tell an adult.



Playing with UXO a few years ago in Juba:

What war was this ordnance left over from? I don't think I'd even walk around that stuff.

Jim

When spending time in West Germany back in the early 80's I accompanied my German friend and a colleague on a camping weekend across the river Rhine in a hilly forest in France where a WWI battle had taken place. Lots of trenches and bunkers still visible. They used metal detectors to locate caches of ammo and other artifacts from those early battle days.

They had found complete rifles, bayonets, etc on other occasions (and some soldiers skeletons in a bunker once) but this time we found a lot of ammo which they would bring back across the border, pull the bullets and use the powder and tumbled bullets for reloading. The 8mm Lebel and of course their own 8mm Mauser ammo all had smokeless powder.

We found quite a few unexploded German stick grenades, these just had a fuse that burnt up through the centre of the handle and ignited the can of black powder on the end of the stick. The fuses seemed to burn out on occasion just where it entered the handle so they were safe to play around with in terms of not having detonator.

I recovered a spent Lebel projectile that had hit something and bent the tip over. I still have it plus one of the many live Lebel cartridges we recovered on that excursion.

I also located an unexploded 3" shell which I carefully exposed, took a photo of and then reburied.

My friend had quite a few pineapple grenades that he had recovered, made safe and painted up as ornaments. They did not go around the WWII battle fields as the unexploded ordnance was much more dangerous.

Was an illegal but interesting weekend!

I know it wont work for everyone but when the police department I worked for moved to a new building several grenades were found in some old evidence boxes. I called EOD over at Fort Dix. a real nice gunny sgt brought me over a nice slab of C-4 and a cap. wraped the grenades in the c-4 and detonated the whole mess. it got rid of the grenades for sure.

Years ago I unearthed a live mortar round while digging a foxhole..... About 4' down in sandy soil and I heard a 'tink, tink' when the shovel hit the tail. I exposed the tail with my hands and when I saw the fins took a break and called in EOD. Guy pulled it out and inspected it. The nose cone was crushed and when removed showed live explosives. He took it to a nearby field within view and blew it with C4. Made the day more interesting anyway.

I have enough redneck friends….

pasture
fence post
duct tape
long piece of string




Of course, the problem would be when you pulled the pin and nothing happens.

THEN what do you do!

quote:

Originally posted by arkypete:
What war was this ordnance left over from? I don't think I'd even walk around that stuff.

Jim

It's been pretty much non-stop civil war since the 1950s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_South_Sudan

The stuff in my pictures looks Soviet to me.

quote:

I was expecting a great big explosion.

Instead all I got was a stream of smoke from the bullet home!!

It was a smoke bomb!

I am very glad nothing happened to you. As a different example, a buddy of mine was at Holloman AFB in New Mexico. The Military Police had cordoned off a large geographical area and were waiting for Bomb Disposal experts. Once he got to his meeting, he asked some of the Air Force Civilians about the road blockages and was told that someone had found an old bomb. Bud then suggested blowing it up in place, and was told, that may not be the best as the bomb may contain nerve agent!

Think of that before puncturing any future ordnance. It may be carrying something nastier than a high explosive payload.

Many years ago I worked at a student construction brigade" - in the Soviet Union was such a practice, students were given the opportunity to work in the summer, during the holidays. Spartan conditions, but in those days a lot of money, and without any taxes. We reconstructed an old wooden pigsty, in fact, build it again from the brick. It was in the Smolensk region, where during the second world war were heavy fighting, and we collected quite a lot of iron trash. Partly took it with us at home and the rest just poured concrete at the bottom of the foundation of the pigsty. And now I think, whether properly we have made? But if this pigsty again came under reconstruction, and the old foundation will break by the excavator? And there were very dangerous things, then I didn't know, such as armour-piercing projectiles, fired, but not exploded. It is like broken glass, danderous in centuries. Now we would most likely be appealed to the police.

I was an army officer in mid eighties. During a course we found an unexploded "bouncing betty" in a field. I decided to blow it with 250 grams TNT..

The bloody thing refused to go off..

I approached again..and veeery carefully placed 500 grams TNT beside it...and finally it went off...spooky.

Reading this has got me to thinking about an old projectile I have in my collection. It is of the bore rider design with a copper driving band. BIG brass or bronze screw in the base. I have no idea if it was de-milled or not. I'll try to post pictures If I find it and it doesn't blow me to smitherines. It came with a brass shell-very old.

I am now more than a little worried I may have something with jellied nitro inside it

drewhenrytnt,

Some older ordinance, WWI or older used a varity of compositions as bursting charges, some that have been forgotten completely by most people that aren't repositories of arcane trivia

one of the more common in WW-I ordinance is simple Picric Acid, which becomes disturbingly unstable when near certain
metals, Particularly copper or it's alloys

WW-I ordinance can also contain any of an explosive family based not upon Nitrogen, buy Chlorine. and members of that explosive family Make nitrogen based compoundes seem "Friendly" by comparison.
They are easily made under primitive conditions, Impossible to detect with some automated detection equipment in use today, but the stuff it as "Twitchy" as a meyth-head on a bad acid trip.

and copper or nickel alloys make it worse.

AD

They're called picrates, bad news. Wife used to be a medical lab technologist. They used picric acid in some tests, always stored under water. I always wonder about those piles of WWl shells the French are still plowing up.

Grizz

Every year I work a local county fair . On opening night they have a nice professional fireworks display .

The next day , they were cleaning up and mowing the field , when there was a large boom and a big plume of smoke !!

The county employee running the mower had to go home and change his pants for sure !!

Nitrocellulose based propellants are commonly found in old Ordnance. If it is a double based propellant it also contains nitroglycerine. Most solid rocket motors, such as used in big rockets, or little rockets such as anti tank weapons, have double based propellants. I suspect if I were to look at what is inside warheads, double based propellants would be common. Nitroglycerine accelerates the deterioration of nitrocellulose and the stuff is wicked to the surface of the propellant grain by humidity. Water molecules condense and evaporate on the powder grain wicking nitroglycerine to the surface.

As such, old ordnance can be extremely unstable. There was no expectation the stuff was last decades, instead, given the country itself might disappear in a couple of years, wartime ammunition was shoveled out the door and quality control was poor.

Occasionally I find references to Civil War collector's dying when a CW artillery shell blows up. Black powder is extremely stable and stays dangerous for centuries if kept dry. I have a newspaper clipping, from the 70's, for a Gettysburg PA Collector who blew up his store and killed a customer, monkeying around with a CW shell. This account was not found with a web search, so I suspect there are a lot more accounts in newspaper archives that are not accessible via the web.

Here is a recent accident, another Civil War collector killed:

Sam White's tragic accident: http://www.americandigger.com/SamWhiteAccident.htm

I was in college in the mid 70's, I worked in a National Park every summer doing various manual labor tasks.

I have forgotten just how we found these but we founds a number of cannon balls buried. They were pretty big, perhaps 10-12 inches in diameter. We alerted our superiors. The Park Rangers decided that we needed to retrieve them all. We dug them all up and loaded them in the back of a pickup. When we got to where we were to take them, we decided the easy way to unload them was to let the tail gate down, back up and hit the brakes. It worked perfectly. They all rolled out banging into each other when they hit the concrete.

The Park Rangers alerted the military. They sent some guy to take a look. I didn't like the look on his face. He ended up having a big truck come and take the cannonballs to Fort Rucker . We were told later that these were all live rounds and they all readily blew up when the bomb disposal people tried.

This scared the hell out of me and my buddy. We had dumped these out in a very dangerous manner. My buddy had taken one to his house. After hearing that these were live rounds, he took it in his boat and dumped it in the middle of Pensacola Bay.

We dodged a bullet that day.

A high school girlfriend's father bought a supposedly demilled F-4 ejection seat for tickles. Had it in his office for years and I sat in it countless times. Several years later a neighbor who was a Phantom driver during the 60's told him the seat was not demilled and still had a live catapult charge in it. The seat was quietly removed to parts unknown...

That would have been a very short and very exciting ride.