120mm prac round with plastic driving band.

**Chubbster** · 8th August 2012, 03:47 PM

Hi all,

I have acquired a 120mm prac round which has a plastic removable driving band. Is this so the round could be reused? I have another 120mm prac round that has a brass driving band. Is the plastic driving band a later type? I'm new to ordnance and not sure now to date them.

Thanks
alex

**apfsds** · 8th August 2012, 04:58 PM

Hi Alex! Anyway that you can post a few photos. It would help with the ID. Guessing the "plastic" driving band is really nylon?

Jason

**Chubbster** · 8th August 2012, 05:12 PM

Jason,

Yeah its white nylon, not sure how to post picture from my phone! It has RLB 78 stamped on the body the lower body and the steel slug inside. Does this mean 1978?

Cheers
alex

**apfsds** · 9th August 2012, 10:39 PM

Not a 100% sure of the meaning of the RLB 78 stamp. Could mean the year? Does the nylon band freely rotate or spin around the projectile or is it fixed to it so that it does not spin? If you take a picture of it with your Iphone, then e-mail the photo so you can put it on your real computer, you can then upload the picture to photobucket.com to then post here. I am sure there may be a easier way.

Jason

**spotter** · 10th August 2012, 12:46 PM

If your adding images to site could you try to use the forums imaging software,as weve found that quite often images from external image hosting sites photobucket etc tend to be deleted and leave posts without images thereby making them useless to other users..
Thanks
Spotter

**Barrowman** · 14th August 2012, 08:21 AM

RLB 78 Royal Laboratary Berkley And year of manufacture

**exat808** · 14th August 2012, 07:21 PM

I would suggest that RLB is the Royal Ordnance Factory (Later Royal Ordnance Plc) at Birtley. This was the UK's last major projectile manufacturing plant.

**Harvey** · 15th August 2012, 09:38 AM

Hi Alex,

Your first question is if the nylon driving band is so that the round can be reused. I doubt it very much, as any sort of impact would deform the projectile so that subsequent re-use would have an implicit loss of accuracy. I have encountered nylon driving bands on HESH and HEAT rounds where they are designed to slip around the body of the projectile. The effect of HESH and HEAT is reduced if the projectile is spinning on impact, but the nylon driving band allows these rounds to be fired from a rifled gun.

Whilst I'm not a projectile expert (as some here could claim to be), I do know that the 120mm HESH practice round had 4 tracer pockets in the base and no nose fusing.

**Chubbster** · 15th August 2012, 04:49 PM

Thanks for all the replys

Markings on the projectile are:

120mm TK DRILL
SX 167A
RLB 78

I will email some pics to the modarator to up load.

Cheers
alex

**exat808** · 15th August 2012, 04:55 PM

A slight change from the "practice" projectile as the thread originally stated.
The "drill" projectile was used to teach crews aspects of gun drill without having to use live rounds on a range. A "practice" projectile would have been fired and ( see recent thread re this) would have contained live explosive components such as tracers and possibly flash and smoke elements depending on what type of projectile we are talking about.
The SX167A relates to the design drawing number.