Question..electriclly tested Arty Ammo????

[RHClarke]

Recent manuals indicate that electrical testing of rounds and missiles refers to circuit checks that are conducted to determine the fitness of the various electrical systems. Rocket motors come to mind as do electrically set fuzed ammo.

Manuals go to great lengths to warn the user to only use an authorized test kit and suitable power source sufficient for the testing and to avoid using a power source that may cause a reaction in the explosive component of the round or missile. Makes sense.

There are some older manuals that discuss static discharge limits and lightning strikes on ammo storage sites.

Not much has changed with regards to electrical testing of ammo since WWII. Ammo Techs still want to walk out of the bunker alive - the test kits have changed as have the complexity of the ammo.

[Dean (Ajax)]

Thanks guys...now, I wonder what the launcher looked like..and did they shoot the round into the lake ( Ontario) or wha happened to it???

I mean, if they fired the round into the lake..how would they know it worked??? The Projectile would not go off on impact with the water..and how far out into the lake would it have gone???

Just questions I now have after really lookng into how "Shells" were filled, painted, packed and tested.

There are so many dead ends on this..as I live in Ajax..the largest shell filling town outside Russia during the War...you would think I could find the answers to this and many other questions..not even our Archives out here can answer many questions..hell I asked questions they never thought of...never mind could answer..

Well the Film Production I am helping out on this has almost no money...yup. if we were American...I could see the Millions rolling in..however it is a case of the Devil you know...sort of thing....the scripts are somewhat...well lets just say...someone that knows NOTHING about this wrote them..and I am trying to point out the errors...while providing a "way" do sort it out.

One guy found on line a photo of a cutaway 18 pounder..so everything he bought looked like the stuff in the photo...including the cordite...I had to tell him that cordite was not soft..but brittle..and the photo he had was of a Traing Aid...so they used thick string for the cordite...limp stuff!!!

Well, Do what you can to make it closer to right..maybe next time!!!

Dean

[motto]

One of the contributors to the Australian Shooters Journal was an ammunition tester during WW2 and has referred to some of his activities in his articles for the magazine. He worked in South Australia and for one of the tests they used a huge flat area in which they fired vertically so as to recover the projectiles with as little damage as possible. I think it was on the coast somewhere. Perhaps they were doing something similar at Ajax
As regards electrical firing. In this instance it probably refers to remote firing of the weapon as most artillery and probably all was percussion ignition. Electrically ignited munitions have been around since the late 1800s but were to my knowledge confined to shipboard or fixed shore installations.
David

[Dean (Ajax)]

Thank you....wish I could find photos of them doing this.

Thank you again
Dean

[Marc Montgomery]

Dean, are you sure about it being the biggest? Camp Bouchard in Blainville (about 20 min from my house) was several km sq in area. Its now a major equestrian area, lots of housing (of course) and the site of an automaker test track (closed to public) which you can easily see on google earth. When I was there several years ago, you could still find in the wooded areas remnants of foundations and some of the small calibre filling stations.. These were rows of three sided concrete cubicles..so that if one blew..it would up and back through the wood roof and rear but not forward into the building or beside into the other cubicles. (a blast wall would be outside building-see photo) I have somewhere in my collection “then and now” photos..but these are not available to me at present (were they in a Convoy Mag??)

In walking the still wooded areas (again several years ago) you would come across other vestiges of the past including for example fire hydrants in the middle of the woods..

There was daily train service for the thousands of workers to and from..and of course other train tracks into the plant itslef to transport the vast amount of munitions…train evidence all gone now. And the plant even had its own bus service.

The other major plant was Cherrier, now Le Gardeur..also about 20 min from my house in the other direction, but I’ve never been there. Its now all new boring soulless suburb. I doubt anyone there knows anything at all about the plant/war effort there. Probably any evidence of its existence is long gone.

Quite some time ago I somehow came across medical reports (online somewhere) about worker health.. Seems after awhile, it was discovered that many workers began to suffer from TNT poisoning in spite of precautions of mandatory showers, washing of work clothes etc.. (this was also the case in WWI) I seem to recall that they began to limit the time workers spent directly with the explosives to a period of several months before switching to other functions

**(veterans affairs website) ***= For example, Quebec, one of the main suppliers of arms to the Allied forces, alone provided up to one third of the country's civilian workforce, earning it the name of Canada's Arsenal! Quebec had the country's two tank factories, five main shipyards, two of the four largest gun manufacturing plants, practically all the plants producing small calibre ammunition, ten plants manufacturing shells, the only plant producing air bombs, almost half the explosives and chemical factories, and three out of eight aircraft plants. The armament plants were literally industrial cities. The largest, Defence Industries Limited's Cherrier plant, located in Saint-Paul-L'Ermite (today known as Le Gardeur, just outside of Montréal), alone had 450 buildings spread over 15 square kilometres! ****


Also in one of the old Convoy Magazines, there is a big story on the Angus Yards tank plant in Montreal. Lots of then and now photos. Mostly housing development now. Part of the main plant is now a big supermarket, another part is converted into office space


Bouchard and Cherrier photos
1- Blast wall outside a shell filling building
2- Inspection window into one of the filling cubicles ( I have a fragment of the triple layer armoured glass window)

3- Filling a torpedo warhead
4- One of the filling cubicles mentioned
5- Stencilling 25pdr shells

[Marc Montgomery]

PS- there seems to have been a great deal of quality control too..

testing of explosive charge weight, exact dimensions, effort to separate shell from cartridge, defects etc etc etc

[Dean (Ajax)]

THANK YOU!!! I have found over 300 photos of the D I L Plant in Ajax..but yours are the only photos I have seen shown the blast walls.

I have found many photos of the entire process for filling, painting the shells and projectiles..and the many inspections also..even a copy of a workers photo album

One thing you mentioned also explains a photo I have seen reproducted many times..listed as being DIL Ajax, but I knew it could not be from that plant....The famous photo of the 500 LBS air dropped Bombs.
I will pass this info on.

Thank you aain
Dean