Posted on 04/01/2016 7:22:11 PM PDT by Morgana
“What are the odds it would go off after all these years?”
More than you’d want to risk.
Black Powder can be very unstable many years after manufacture. Very dangerous.
Well, it is BLACK powder.
There was some family who brought one home and used it as a door stop.
Someone recognized it and when the bomb squad tested it it blowed up real good.
But if you see them bringing home stray jihadists...
There's gonna need to be an intervention.
Yeah.
Intervention see?
FRgards,
Jedi.
I just got back from the Somme battlefield in Northern France. Every spring farmers plow up ordinance from WW1. A couple of years ago a large shell spontaneously exploded manking a crater 20 feet across.....
They are harmless if you keep them in cages. :)
Many a World War I battlefield over there is clearly marked with warnings not to stray from the cleared trails. Several years ago I recall hearing of two French Army soldiers (of all people) who purposely walked off a marked trail at the Verdun battlefield and were blown up by an unexploded shell.
It’s not just shells either. Damaged firearms are also dug up once in a while...and even in their mangled state, they are still loaded and potentially live.
I still go off occasionally, after all these years. You never know. Better safe than sorry....
Never
The civil war era stuff is much more dangerous than modern munitions. Fortunately, there’s also a lot less of it.
Why is he referred to as “the man” and no name is given. April Fools?
Tonight on the local news here in Houston they told about a disk jockey in the 60s or 70s announced a Russian sub was spotted in Lake Houston. If you saw Lake Houston you’d know that’s not possible. They said there was a traffic jam of people trying to get to the lake to see the sub. The sheriff called the deejay and made him announce that it was a joke. That has to be the best deejay April Fools joke I’ve ever heard.
If I were you, I’d go back and salvage those cannon balls. Then, I’d sell them to yankee collectors . . .
My guide found us a field loaded with artifacts. I found lots of bullets, empty cartridges magazines a 3 inch piece of shrapnel and an EMPTY artillery shell with the top off of it about 4 inches in diameter.
When we drove by fields saw lots of unexploded ordinance piled at the roadside spray painted fluorescent colors for EOD to collect.
As an Army brat in Schwanheim, Germany in 1949 my friend and I found un exploded bombs in the wood......We must have been about 8 years old.
But Darwin Award candidates that we were, I remember we lifted these about fifty pound bombs up and dropped them!
Brilliant
Low but some of that stuff is still active. There was a thread here a few years ago about a guy in Virginia that was killed by civil war UXO that he found, took home and blew up in his garage.
During World War I an estimated one tonne of explosives was fired for every square metre of territory on the Western front. As many as one in every three shells fired did not detonate. In the Ypres Salient, an estimated 300 million projectiles that the British and the Germans forces fired at each other during World War I were duds, and most of them have not been recovered. In 2013, 160 tonnes of munitions, from bullets to 15 inch naval gun shells, were unearthed from the areas around Ypres.
Count to ten.
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