i am not sure if this is the best place for this post. It's about the WW2 British Fuze, Instantaneous. I understand it filled the gap between the Bickford Safety Fuse that burned at 1cm/second, and Cordtex which was around 7,000 meters/second. In Anders' excellent book he describes Fuse, Instantaneous Mk. III as having a burn rate of about 30 meters/second.
I don' know if this fuse was used much later. Do any of you have experience with it? What was it used for? I assume it was used to link charges so they almost go up at the same time, would it not be better to carry only Cordtex or Primacord for this purpose? Or was the other fuse safer to be around when the shooting starts?
Does anyone know if there were other Marks used in the war? Same orange color? I want to make some dummy fuse for my display and be able to say what it was for.
I have to tell a funny story about this fuse. It is in the book, "Aston House Station 12, SOE's Secret Centre" by Des Turner. A must-read for anyone interested in SOE gadgets and this place in particular. Turner tracked down people many decades later who worked there and interviewed them. This was after the Official Secrets Act expired for them, so most talked. Luckily he had long talks with the second CO, Col. Leslie J. C. Wood. 90 pages are devoted to him. Great stuff, he was very funny. They had a lot of fun at Aston House. He said the Commandos would come down occasionally to see what they were doing and to discuss special weapons for raids. There was a Canadian Sapper there at the time. Wood writes, "He then added, 'I have an idea for the Commandos. It's an arse-lifter.' I said, 'That sounds lovely, what is it?' It consisted of a thick sheet of asbestos put under the mattress and under that was a coil of fuse, instantaneous. Well, instantaneous fuse isn't a high explosive but it goes off nearly as fast and it's quite forceful stuff."
"He got a coil of this underneath the mattress and underneath the asbestos and he worked out the statistics exactly so that when this chap lay down and it went off, he wouldn't quite hit the ceiling. One of the gadgets we had was a pressure switch, you see, and his weight would set this off."
He went on. "My contribution was a metronome (I am laughing as I type this) that I put in an empty cupboard in a corner of the big dormitory where we housed them for the night. I climbed on the roof and lowered some fuse down the chimney and blew the chimney into the room and that shook things up a bit; everything they'd touched had gone off and we had a mike (mic) fixed up so that we could listen to everything that went on. I heard somebody call his mate and say, 'I can't sleep in this fug, all gunpowder and everything else, go and open the window George.' 'You open it, I'm not going to.' So at any rate they got the window open. We hadn't booby-trapped it. I waited until they were just dozing off and then I started this metronome going in the hollow cupboard. It went tick, tick, by gosh, the scramble then to get under their beds before something went off! At any rate, we had a very good time."
I won't go on about what Wood said about when he was later invited up to Arisaig House in Scotland where the Commandos trained. Let's just say they got him back using Fuse, Instantaneous!
I don' know if this fuse was used much later. Do any of you have experience with it? What was it used for? I assume it was used to link charges so they almost go up at the same time, would it not be better to carry only Cordtex or Primacord for this purpose? Or was the other fuse safer to be around when the shooting starts?
Does anyone know if there were other Marks used in the war? Same orange color? I want to make some dummy fuse for my display and be able to say what it was for.
I have to tell a funny story about this fuse. It is in the book, "Aston House Station 12, SOE's Secret Centre" by Des Turner. A must-read for anyone interested in SOE gadgets and this place in particular. Turner tracked down people many decades later who worked there and interviewed them. This was after the Official Secrets Act expired for them, so most talked. Luckily he had long talks with the second CO, Col. Leslie J. C. Wood. 90 pages are devoted to him. Great stuff, he was very funny. They had a lot of fun at Aston House. He said the Commandos would come down occasionally to see what they were doing and to discuss special weapons for raids. There was a Canadian Sapper there at the time. Wood writes, "He then added, 'I have an idea for the Commandos. It's an arse-lifter.' I said, 'That sounds lovely, what is it?' It consisted of a thick sheet of asbestos put under the mattress and under that was a coil of fuse, instantaneous. Well, instantaneous fuse isn't a high explosive but it goes off nearly as fast and it's quite forceful stuff."
"He got a coil of this underneath the mattress and underneath the asbestos and he worked out the statistics exactly so that when this chap lay down and it went off, he wouldn't quite hit the ceiling. One of the gadgets we had was a pressure switch, you see, and his weight would set this off."
He went on. "My contribution was a metronome (I am laughing as I type this) that I put in an empty cupboard in a corner of the big dormitory where we housed them for the night. I climbed on the roof and lowered some fuse down the chimney and blew the chimney into the room and that shook things up a bit; everything they'd touched had gone off and we had a mike (mic) fixed up so that we could listen to everything that went on. I heard somebody call his mate and say, 'I can't sleep in this fug, all gunpowder and everything else, go and open the window George.' 'You open it, I'm not going to.' So at any rate they got the window open. We hadn't booby-trapped it. I waited until they were just dozing off and then I started this metronome going in the hollow cupboard. It went tick, tick, by gosh, the scramble then to get under their beds before something went off! At any rate, we had a very good time."
I won't go on about what Wood said about when he was later invited up to Arisaig House in Scotland where the Commandos trained. Let's just say they got him back using Fuse, Instantaneous!