Posted on 04/04/2006 12:35:12 PM PDT by BenLurkin
AP) VENTURA, Calif. Part of a teacher's hand was blown off when a 40 millimeter round the instructor used as a paperweight on his desk exploded in his classroom.
Robert Colla struck the round with an object Tuesday afternoon while teaching 20 to 25 students at the Ventura Adult Education Center.
Yep, if they are spent that is fine, but this guy must have had rocks in his head not to recognize a live round when he sees it:) I had an ashtray(wish I still had it) made out of a 5 inch round(it had no primer and was cut off about 4 inches above the rim) from WWII. It was quite a conversation piece!
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!!!!!! The photoshop looks better! HAHAHA!!!
What happen?
Somebody set up us the bomb!
What happen?
Somebody set up us the bomb!
Those WHO can, do: Those WHO can't, teach.
People or groups of people are never referred to using the pronoun, "that." Pronouns are essential in promoting the appearance of intelligence.
:-p
:-D
(Now, I'll go put on my Nomex suit.)
May have had a "brokeback" paperweight. ;-)
KATY cOURIC after sitting on a 40mm round.
No, but this is:
"Hold muh beer and watch this!"
Foot or two lower and he'd be a Darwin nominee.
Before or after the fact?
What a loon.
On CAMPEN in mid-1980 we had a Marine who went out to the grenade range with a buddy (202-A, I think) at around 1 in the morning, drunk as a skunk, and they were wandering around in the impact area. This guy picked up what he later described as a "golden golf ball", and that was the last thing he remembered.
He won't make that mistake again. Cost of the lesson: Right arm up to the elbow, right eye, some teeth, and some neat scarring patterns that you just can't get any other way.
Yep.......stuff like that is why we kept our EOD shop door locked. The door was almost vault like as we always had some gomer who'd try to bring us "something" he found. Just not enough seat cushion on a goobermint chair to sustain the pucker factor when an idgit slams down a 66MM LAW rocket on yer desk and says lookie what I found !!
Is it dangerous ?
We would peek out at all visitors and if they had something in their hand we'd tell em to drop it in a sandbagged area we had across the parking lot for just such occasions.
Lots of trench art, flower pots made from 40 pound 5 inch 38 rounds that had experimental nose fuses in em w/o explosives, 240mm Arty brass Lamps, etc etc .......
40MM HEDP or HE has a nifty little butterfly that will click and buzz just a bit and if your ever lucky enough to tell others what that sound is you have cheated death. Hopefully without injury. Believe it or not we used to pick up and hand carry 40mm HE rounds to a collection point and detonate the pile, some services EOD teams will NOT hand carry em and counter charges each round at great expense of resources. We'd snag em and carefully carry em and set em down very easily and then counter charge the pile and destroy......
He cant have known that was a live round much less a 40mm he had for a paperweight. Good thing it was not a 105mm he had there.
ban paperweights
Ban teachers. The public school kind, anyway.
It took about 400 rpm to arm the centrifugal arming fuze of the M406 HE grenade, reached after traveling through the rifled M79 barrel out to around 20 meters, [at which point the grenade had reached some 3,700 rpm] one reason M79 grenadiers were usually also given a .45 pistol in the event things got busy in closer than that. Fuzing on the HEDP round may be different, but the bulk of our work was done with the M406, and the XM585 white star cluster, the few WP rounds available being unreliable after exposure to wet monsoon season weather.
Once the M406 detonated, it popped up in the air like a *bouncing betty* charge, went off and spread 300 prefragmented notched-wire frags at 1,500 meters per second within a lethal radius of up to 5 meters- the frags were not very aerodynamic, but like the notched-wire frag of the M26 *lemon* frag hand grenade, sometimes struck head-on like a needle, other times spinning sideways to keyhole and tumble into the recipient. Nasty, and not the sort of thing to be spreading around in classrooms.
Believe it or not we used to pick up and hand carry 40mm HE rounds to a collection point and detonate the pile, some services EOD teams will NOT hand carry em and counter charges each round at great expense of resources. We'd snag em and carefully carry em and set em down very easily and then counter charge the pile and destroy......
My experience with M406 grenades was in the field, less formal than at an EOD shop *in the rear with the gear.* But the usual procedure was to very, very carefully slip the blade of an entrenching tool under the grenade body without touching it [you think cheese can be sliced thin!] then slowly pulling it away via a 200-meter length of parachute cord or bomb lanyard [550 cord] tied to a hole in the shovel handle. The little Canadian FIXOR binary shaped charges they use now for 40mm grenades, especially those of the HEDP flavor, or a much better arrangement, and also work nicely for UXO mortar rounds and mines.
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