T
toysareforboys
Guest
The folks over on MilitaryPhotos.net told me to ask this here. Mostly to find out information on what the heck an XM199 40MM round is... My friends place is in Pickering, Ont.
Well, it's my friends birthday today. He got quite a bit of stuff, including an INSANE metal detector (full computer screen on it, lots of features, you can set detection depth, etc.), so we decided to pull it out and give it a try.
We decided to do his back yard. We followed the directions on how to do a grid sweep of the lawn.
On our third pass the metal detector went crazy. We looked at the screen and it detected "metal rebar", and upon scanning the area, it was in a cross hatch pattern.
Looking at the ground, it was just the lawn. It was weird that there would be concrete rebar under there. It told us the depth was 24" to the rebar.
Out come the shovles and after about 10 mins we hit something hard.
It turned out to be a very rough surface of concrete with rebar sticking out in some places. We dug all the way around, which turned out to be a perfect circle about 6 feet in diameter. Once we dug all the edges we attached a boat anchor to one side, and wrapped a cable around the tow hook on his 4x4 truck. It took quite a few yanks, but we flipped the concrete slab over.
Sticking out of the concrete slab was a HUGE cartridge! Must be 150MM at least! Lots of rocks, dirt, etc covering most of the bottom of the concrete.
We looked into the hole, more dirt. We jumped down, sparked up the metal detector, and it was going crazy. It couldn't identify anything in paticular, measured a depth to 6 feet (it's maximum range) of metal.
We started digging and immediatly started pulling out different cartridges, all with bullets pulled out but sitting right beside the cartridges, nothing loaded. A little further and a few layers of what looked like 40MM M203 hulls for my sweet M203. I picked up a few, took em inside, wiped off the mud, measured them and sure enuff, 40mm. SWEET!
We picked up about 200 cartridges and 40mm hulls. Underneath the hulls were rows and rows of propellers. We pulled up on one, but it was damn damn heavy. Took both of us to pull it up. It looked like a torpedo cut in half (by a big chop saw). Looking into where it had been, we could see the front half of it. The propeller would not spin. Looking in the cut end it was basically three tubes, the outer one had like a gray clay pack inbetween the outer tube and the middle tube. The middle tube was full of a white powder like surgar but bigger granuals, in what looked like little potato sacks (but white). The very inside tube was full of weird looking things (batteries I think, longer then AA, but skinnier and looked like wrapped in cardboard and vaseline. Metal hooking tabs at each end).
When we saw the batteries we stopped digging.
I begged him for me to bring home some stuff to clean and photo graph it, but he said he wanted to sell it on EBay or go to the local army surplus store and see what they'd give him for it, and he didn't trust me to take anything home. I convinced him to let me take home some of the 40MM hulls we found so I could load em up for my M203, he agreed.
So, here are the 40MM hulls. Any information you can provide would be great. Date, type, etc. There were tons more of them, some OD green, some blue, most are black or bright green.
The headstamps are as follows:
Green Anodized: XM199 EI GIE-60-10 3-68
Green Anodized: XM199 EI GIE-60-11 4-68
Green Anodized: XM199 EI GIE-60-11 4-68
Black Anodized: XM576 EI GIE-60-7 12-67
Small/Large
Small/Large
Small/Large
Small/Large
Small/Large
So..... what should I do now? Keep digging? Pull out everything, clean it off, mark down the head stamps? Should I be worried about any possibly live munitions? It looks like this is a very deep "well", there's probably tons of stuff in there. It's basically about a 5ft metal colvert going all the way down.
I'm going back on Sunday (weather permitting) with my digital camera. Lots more pics then!
-Jamie M.
Well, it's my friends birthday today. He got quite a bit of stuff, including an INSANE metal detector (full computer screen on it, lots of features, you can set detection depth, etc.), so we decided to pull it out and give it a try.
We decided to do his back yard. We followed the directions on how to do a grid sweep of the lawn.
On our third pass the metal detector went crazy. We looked at the screen and it detected "metal rebar", and upon scanning the area, it was in a cross hatch pattern.
Looking at the ground, it was just the lawn. It was weird that there would be concrete rebar under there. It told us the depth was 24" to the rebar.
Out come the shovles and after about 10 mins we hit something hard.
It turned out to be a very rough surface of concrete with rebar sticking out in some places. We dug all the way around, which turned out to be a perfect circle about 6 feet in diameter. Once we dug all the edges we attached a boat anchor to one side, and wrapped a cable around the tow hook on his 4x4 truck. It took quite a few yanks, but we flipped the concrete slab over.
Sticking out of the concrete slab was a HUGE cartridge! Must be 150MM at least! Lots of rocks, dirt, etc covering most of the bottom of the concrete.
We looked into the hole, more dirt. We jumped down, sparked up the metal detector, and it was going crazy. It couldn't identify anything in paticular, measured a depth to 6 feet (it's maximum range) of metal.
We started digging and immediatly started pulling out different cartridges, all with bullets pulled out but sitting right beside the cartridges, nothing loaded. A little further and a few layers of what looked like 40MM M203 hulls for my sweet M203. I picked up a few, took em inside, wiped off the mud, measured them and sure enuff, 40mm. SWEET!
We picked up about 200 cartridges and 40mm hulls. Underneath the hulls were rows and rows of propellers. We pulled up on one, but it was damn damn heavy. Took both of us to pull it up. It looked like a torpedo cut in half (by a big chop saw). Looking into where it had been, we could see the front half of it. The propeller would not spin. Looking in the cut end it was basically three tubes, the outer one had like a gray clay pack inbetween the outer tube and the middle tube. The middle tube was full of a white powder like surgar but bigger granuals, in what looked like little potato sacks (but white). The very inside tube was full of weird looking things (batteries I think, longer then AA, but skinnier and looked like wrapped in cardboard and vaseline. Metal hooking tabs at each end).
When we saw the batteries we stopped digging.
I begged him for me to bring home some stuff to clean and photo graph it, but he said he wanted to sell it on EBay or go to the local army surplus store and see what they'd give him for it, and he didn't trust me to take anything home. I convinced him to let me take home some of the 40MM hulls we found so I could load em up for my M203, he agreed.
So, here are the 40MM hulls. Any information you can provide would be great. Date, type, etc. There were tons more of them, some OD green, some blue, most are black or bright green.
The headstamps are as follows:
Green Anodized: XM199 EI GIE-60-10 3-68
Green Anodized: XM199 EI GIE-60-11 4-68
Green Anodized: XM199 EI GIE-60-11 4-68
Black Anodized: XM576 EI GIE-60-7 12-67
Small/Large
Small/Large
Small/Large
Small/Large
Small/Large
So..... what should I do now? Keep digging? Pull out everything, clean it off, mark down the head stamps? Should I be worried about any possibly live munitions? It looks like this is a very deep "well", there's probably tons of stuff in there. It's basically about a 5ft metal colvert going all the way down.
I'm going back on Sunday (weather permitting) with my digital camera. Lots more pics then!
-Jamie M.
