S-mine 35: The Bouncing Betty

all right so what I've got here today is a very interesting mine from the Second World War it's an S mine or they call it shrapnel mine or spring or something like that spring mine anyways and what it is is the bouncing betty it's got the classic s mine 35 fuse on here so z s mi 35 and I've already talked about it so we're not going to get into too much information on this but what I will do is talk about the mine itself and sort of explain how it works this one here as you could see is in pretty good condition it's got all its parts except for the explosive and propellant so we'll get into it first off what you see here is a lot of it's a waxy substance I don't quite know what it's made out of but it makes it a mess to work on so Yolo I may end up putting on a pair of gloves to work on the disassembly just I don't get my hands completely sticky with all that you've got here are the three that are the same size and one that's the different size so this one here is where you fill it up with the explosive and these lead to three little brass tubes where the detonators are inserted normally I'm under the impression that they're supposed to be pieces of wood sticking off of this to keep the detonators in the bottom of this but I could be mistaken so to start off with and I'll explain it also when I'm going through here but this mine here is a bounding mind which means that the person steps on it then continues walking and that starts off a I guess you'd call it it delay and it's four seconds approximately so regardless of whether they're still standing on the fuse that you see here or if they've already stepped off gonna keep walking the fuse fires and then a delay starts burning inside in the wine the delay is approximately four seconds from what I've been told I'm sure it probably varies a little bit doesn't really change much anyways and then the mine here where you see the line ejects out of the bottom part here which is basically just a mortar for it and in order to do that you see there's three screws at the bottom it's got to share those screws so that's what's holding it together right now so it shears those screws it flies up into the air about three feet and then explodes sending a bunch of ball bearings at people so I'll take it apart a bit so that we could see more along the lines of what this mine did um I might change tripod here so any few minutes the first thing I'm going to do is flip it over here and remove the shear bolts open this fits the screwdriver don't appreciate eating these things off too much because I'm afraid to strip them this mind is in surprisingly good condition I don't think it was ever set but it was in the ground because roost rust spots in that from it so I put the little screws down before continue this I know via cloves on now that I have a nice pair gloves on I've taken those screws out this mine should be able to slide out and it's when the shear screws are fired off what a fighter this fierce crows when this mine fires finally have to delay it comes out of the case like that as you can see it's just a steel case flies up and then it explodes what you're hearing right now of all blaring is I'll try to remove this and not have the problem that I had the last time but just start with will just go over this this is a flash tube basically when the primer strikes and burns down towards the base of it there is obviously the way at the end of the lane in here this is just a piece of like thin sheet steel or copper I don't what it is and inside there would be a black powder charge and the other end of the tube after the delay so what happens is it burn a pseudo then it hits a black powder charge a black powder charge pressurizes in here and then it explodes sending the whole thing anyways I'm not gonna remove this because all you see is the bottom end of this tube here sticking out of it so I'll just remove this and show you the inside and I'll leave it on the table because this comes apart completely and I don't want to lose all that that's how you do is just loosen this I got in here it's obviously my top plate some rust that was formed it's been cleaned up these are three brass tubes that had the detonators and they go right to the bottom what they're connected to are little holes with delay pellets in them all right let's see if I could do this without dropping at all so we've got a little string up here which is just for sealing got a bunch more of the pellets ball bearings I'll just put these all right now this whole thing comes apart so you've got the outer shell the inner shell and because this here these were cracked I just put some floss around them to hold them in place but I'll remove it these things here as you see they're just they could be unscrewed I might do that at one point but they contain a little delay pellet fraction of a second just enough time for the the mind to get to the height it needs to get to once that happens so the charge explodes the mine goes up and as a charge exploded the delay pellets all started they have three of them just to make sure that there was an actual proper ignition for it or increase the chance of ignition and they burn for a fraction of a second like I said until it gets to the height that needs to and it explodes and that's basically how one of these mines work that's basically the S wine so I'll just do it one more time to show you somebody would walk this whole thing's buried up to as far as possible so you don't see it you can go there person walks on it steps on it doesn't take that much pressure this pin wouldn't be here obviously maybe I'll make a video how to set it one day anyway so what happened is putting his steps on it I thought this in would fire the fuse fuse what ignited delay still he would burn for about four seconds that black powder while that patch sits underneath there little ring would be full black powder that would explode this whole part will come out so that wouldn't be here anymore it'd be a burst disk there come out underneath here there's three little holes that match with a delay that delay would burn through in a fraction of a second and so that both form that three feet or about just a little under a meter the detonators one of the three at least would go off setting off the explosives and setting off the mine which would spray all the ball bearings at you Suns there and that's how this mine works this is an earlier one which is why there's brass tubes and the three screws here towards the end of the war they didn't have this the holes on the bottom here all they did is they installed the mines same way and then they put a bead of solder want to put solder around the top and seal like that that's what gave enough pressure to jump that these mines were very sensitive to humidity because the black-powder inside it so that's why you've got over the years there's a bunch of different attempts to try to make it completely watertight and they'd have to check in once in a while because so then he wanted get so you got your black powder charge you're basically yeah it's not gonna ignite properly and that this whole line basically requires that to ignite you could step on it if the black powder charge doesn't ignite it doesn't ignite the little delays which would then set off mine so it's very important in the 44 they changed that and they went to smokeless powder I think as along the launching charge and instead of having the delays burned through it just had a cable connected to a another fuse once we got to the height the cable extended to its maximum it pulled and set off another primer which detonated the bomb or the mine anyways thanks for watching hope you enjoyed this and if you have any questions please leave them in the comments apart from that hopefully I have another few videos out soon and that's about it thanks for watching

Channel: Stray03

Views: 226,782

Rating: 4.4289885 out of 5

Keywords: mine, s-mine, landmine, danger, ww2, germany, betty, bouncing, bounding

Id: c_YO1MuStIM

Length: 12min 2sec (722 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 16 2018