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WW1 75mm Field Gun shell cutaway


iron bender
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Picked this up today and thought it was kinda cool. 8/18 date casing, shell and casing both marked BHCo. Not sure if this is a GI cutaway or more recently done by an individual. Enjoy

 

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Nice example. Most likely a very early Ordnance collector's cut a way. Old, but the ball stack up sloppy. Unfired Shrapnel rounds complete with pusher plates very, very hard to find ( rare) on their own, then add the time for machining, a keeper. I have only two aquired from a retired WW2 artillery officers rare collection.post-180924-0-82663400-1578793001_thumb.jpeg

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If possible, you can measure a lead ball diameter. Should be .44 cal (.490" I believe) from the Remington M1858 Army revolver before they were converted to metallic cartridges. Supposedly tons of those balls were surplused when converted and used in these shrapnel shells. Hard to tell by your pics what Diameter they are, but if from the M1858 they are correct.If not, it would indicate a collector made example. The haphazard arrangement leads me to believe a collector piece. From memory, 220? Balls were neatly stacked and then pressed into the case with a black, incendiary matrix filler for spotting the burst. When the black powder at the base was ignited in flight, the pusher plate and balls were expelled out of the steel case and forward. The empty projectile case fell to the ground. They were discharge directional forward and the time fuze was set to expel the lead balls sometimes less than 100 yds in front of the advancing infantry at about 1100-1200 FPS. Brits used them till the end of the war, the US switched to HE shrapnel mid war, that design used HE filler and when exploded used the exploded projectile case pieces as shrapnel- the benefit being the case fragments were jagged and moving at supersonic velocity...drawback was they were unidirectional ( shrapnel went in a huge unpredictable circle- thus it could not be used in close support to advancing infantry). The ball shrapnel round was fascinating in design, like a huge, airborne shotgun shell.

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Best I can measure. They're secured in some sort of glue slop. As you can see it's lost a few round balls. The best one to measure has a flat spot on it exposed. Anyhow, I place my bet on this being a very old collector example. I'm almost 100% positive this would have either been in John Hooper or Rod Parkers collection. They were both big collectors, and John had the machinist background to do this job competently. No clue, but I do like it and plan to hang on to it at least for a while. Guys thanks for all the responses. A bunch of knowledge on this forum

 

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