Hello, Here are pics of an item I picked up recently. It was listed as a German kugel, but thanks to this page on The Grenade Recognition Manual website I was able to ID it as a George Keeling patent grenade, patent #2299904.
http://members.shaw.ca/dwlynn/whatis/whatisit.html
The one on the website looks nearly complete. It looks like it had a tiny ball-chain running through it, which is very curious. I don't know anything about the history of this grenade, how it worked, etc, but I hope to find out more.
The odd thing about the one I have is that the body was never completed. It is just the casting, with no machining to allow installation of any parts. In the second picture you can see depressions cast into one of the frag sections for where it would had been drilled for the wire to pass through. The body was painted, though.
Another unusual feature of this grenade body is that there are two protrusions that run down inside of the fuse hole. They line up with where the chain would pass through, perhaps to support it and/or the fuse. One of the protrusions is about twice as wide as the other. The pics I took of the inside aren't great, but they are visible enough to see the difference in widths.
My attempt at measuring the diameter of the body using inadequate tools has it at 65 or 67mm.
I wanted to share this unusual item here. I hope people found it interesting!
Regards,
Rob
http://members.shaw.ca/dwlynn/whatis/whatisit.html
The one on the website looks nearly complete. It looks like it had a tiny ball-chain running through it, which is very curious. I don't know anything about the history of this grenade, how it worked, etc, but I hope to find out more.
The odd thing about the one I have is that the body was never completed. It is just the casting, with no machining to allow installation of any parts. In the second picture you can see depressions cast into one of the frag sections for where it would had been drilled for the wire to pass through. The body was painted, though.
Another unusual feature of this grenade body is that there are two protrusions that run down inside of the fuse hole. They line up with where the chain would pass through, perhaps to support it and/or the fuse. One of the protrusions is about twice as wide as the other. The pics I took of the inside aren't great, but they are visible enough to see the difference in widths.
My attempt at measuring the diameter of the body using inadequate tools has it at 65 or 67mm.
I wanted to share this unusual item here. I hope people found it interesting!
Regards,
Rob
