I read in the paper this morning that at the war and peace show at the week end a hand grenade went off and blew a lady's fingers off the show organisers said it was nothing to do with them

email (option): roger.beck@node6.com

If it was a real hand grenade, she got off lightly by just losing her fingers?

You should have heard the rumours going around the show

But I understand it was a thunderflash or some type of practice grenade, but it did result in a large section of the stalls being closed off for a good part of Saturday morning whilst a search was made for more WMDs.

Rob

email (option): robmiller11(at)yahoo.co.uk

Never dismantle a thunder flash!

http://www.kentonline.co.uk/times_guardian/news/grenade-explosion-3749/

I know a chap who was stationed in Germany in the 70s and he told me that apparently they used to somehow attach a thunder-flash onto a flare and launch them up into the air from a flare gun like very loud, very dangerous fireworks. One day a thunder-flash went off before the flare had left the end of the barrel and blew the whole gun up in one chaps hand. He ended up with the hammer slashing through his hand between his thumb and forefinger severing all the ligaments, generally knackering his right hand for good and putting an end to his army career.

If she has organised pyrotechnic displays previously she should have known better...Never mess about with anything like that unless you are 110% sure it is inert...I would say she was lucky to get off as lightly as she did...Ian

So far I know the girl was onley 16 years old!
Bram

email (option): Bram@ockhuizen.com

Click on the link above Bram..She doesn't look 16 to me...Ian

Your right Ian she looks not 16!
Bud the story on the W&P was 16 and her hand
Was blowing of.
When i see on a jumble someone is taking the pin
Out a grenade i am always going away!
Bram

email (option): Bram@ockhuizen.com

I'd worry more that the incident happened in Kent.
Kent Police and Kent Council are notorious busybodies of the 'see what they are doing and lets stop it' kind.

You can bet on all sorts of snoopers around W&P soon, out to "protect" the public.

Wilts police are nearly as bad, they hate large gatherings of any kind.
viz Big Green Gathering
Bulldog Bash

both of which they near bankrupted with cash demands.

I know a chap who is regularly involved with militaria displays and has a good collection of grenades of all types, countries and ages. They are all safe and inert, but without fail some monkey will come wondering up to his display and try to pull out a pin from one of them. They don't know if they are safe or not, you'd assume they would be, but that's hardly the point, you should never assume anything where explosives or firearms are concerned. It won't take many incidents like this woman blowing her fingers off before the organisers insurance goes up too far and the event has to be killed off or as Ken says, the local Police get involved and shut things down. Also, for what it's worth, If she's 16, she's had a hard life!!

16 stone .??

Before you moan, I am allowed to say that as I am quite " ample " myself

email (option): dwrudd@lineone.net

I hope that Russian motorcycle is post-war. Otherwise, as it's 'Allied', she could be on the run in Normandy next year....INcoming....

Is the family name a shortened form of Badluck or of BLoody and *UCK ?...either would seem appropriate.

Back in the 70's my dad was in the Diving Unit and used to bring home boxes of thunderflashes, we saw them used to blow up Lego villages, sand castles, they worked especially great when stuffed deep inside a Snowman ( lovely muffled blue explosion as poor Frosty collapsed from internal injuries).
He even built a cannon that required stipping off the outer layer of cardboard, striking the thunderflash and ramming it down with a 1 inch plastic ball as a projectile.
Favorite childhood memory? The time he fired one off into the adjoining woods where there was an archery course. Two archers came stomping mad out of the woods wanting to know what came through the trees above there heads.
Dad calmly told them it was a toy cannon and "must have been the echo"
"Echo my arse!" one of them proclaimed loudly as they stomped back into the woods.
Of the three of us, two brothers escaped the 70's with all 10 fingers. Kid brother suffered a non-explosive related cement mixer accident :(
Ahh, good times!!

I think I was lucky to get through my childhood with everything intact...I started making sodium chlorate bombs encased in the tube from old bicycle frames and naturally progressed to pieces of drainpipe..We used to amuse ourselves blowing down trees and blowing up anything else we could find....
I even experimented with making nitro triiodide..which is bloody dangerous as it is extremely (and dangerously) unstable...
I think the only thing that saved me in that instance was my amateur chemistry skills which somehow produced something less sensitive than it should have been..(probably not very pure).
After that my interest in explosives waned and I got into making rockets...all great fun when you don't realise the dangers..
When I was in the Air cadets and we went on exercises on Dartmoor they used to dish out Thunderflashes as a form of light entertainment and to make it more exciting...How times have changed....
....Ian

That was before health and safety was invented when kids were allowed to have fun and make their own mistakes, great days.

Used to take a fired .303 cartridge and drill a hole big enough to take a banger fuse, use the black powder to fill it and use a pencil as a shell. We managed to stick the pencil in a solid wooden door. drilled the metal end of light bulbs, filled them with meths and lit the fuse and threw.... Lovely Molotovs. Fired rockets from plastic drain pipes like bazookas also made depth charges by tying bangers to rocks.

Life was great in the 50's and 60's.....

Also used to make Kielkraft model aircraft, fill with meths soaked cotton wool. wind the prop up and launch from the fire watching platform on the top of my mates house. It would fly (sort of) for a while and then the flak hit and woomph! Burning debris all over the front garden....

Nic eto see Iwasnt the only delinquent back then.
sodium chlorate made a great bang when you got it right.

bicycle pump bodies in my case.

plus one of those cardboard tubes from curtain rolls and as many roman candle innards as would fit in.

I can still feel that coppers hand on my shoulder...........

It seems that many of us progressed from weedkiller and sugar to old motorcycles. At some time in the 1970s though they started putting fire retardent in it.

Sparklets bulbs made handy little cases and could be easily sealed without the need for a hammered crimp....Did we really do that ?

I don't know about the copper's hand. It was bits of copper pipe bouncing down the neighbour's tiles that I remember.

Cocoa tin hole in bottom and lid, finger over hole in bottom hold over gas ring until you could smell gas, on with lid rest on a couple of bricks light gas coming out of hole when gas and air reached the right combination big bang and tin would go sky wards. Did with one gallon paint tin very big bang and no window.

Aged 9 a mate Denis and I, found some unused electric dets,in a quarry, we daisy chained them together and pushed them into a row of old cabbages in my dads garden and set them off with a couple of cycle batteries in series, he was not impressed we were banned from going out of the garden for a week, and my backside hurt for a couple of days He was a policeman !!! when I got beaten up by a classmate (he put his dad in prison) I went to rough old school, His response to that was, its about time you were able to look after your self and paid my bus fares and a years gym fees to Gravesend boxing club in gorden road, It turned me into a fly weight champion, was never bothered again, the kids today Really don't know we had the best of freedom ever, and if discipline ever came into it we knew why, and found a way of not being caught again. Andrew.h.

email (option): warbikes@gmail.com