British army dump - Very rare Besa find

R

RRPG

New member
HI all

I paid a visit to my British army dump site permission last week and had some great finds again. The majority I already have examples of but I did find one or two 'new' pieces for my collection.

As I already had plenty of examples of a lot of the stuff, I decided to keep my eye in with full restoration and take some back to shiny brass. I don't do this with many relics as I like to keep the aged patina, but the odd one or two shiny items are fine. It also shows that, just because something has been in the ground for 70+ years and is covered in corrosion, it doesn't mean it can't be saved!!

I have also described how I clean the relics in the below video.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0QpawytOjs


Here are the finds. If you want to know what they looked like before being cleaned, you'll need to watch the vid!





303 drill rounds. No percussion caps present in any of these and the headstamp show them to be 'dummy' rounds.



Connectors to fit the condenser pipe to the steam jacket of a Browning M1917 water cooled MG.



Same thing, but this is a Mk I Vickers MG connector.



And these are the more familiar Mk II Vickers elbow connectors




.....more........
 
Top pawl springs from a Vickers feed block



Aerial sights from a Lewis MG



Cloth belt starter tabs and the spouts from oil bottles.



Vickers MG cloth belt starter tabs, all nicely marked, one even dated 1940 (40) :)




Markings on the Browning cloth belt starter tabs.





More......................
 
Lots more buckles again on this trip.....



Lee-Enfield and Springfield sling buckles along with three pull through rods



Kerr sling buckles, (most commonly used with the Thompson SMG). Three different types but all used on the same sling.







All nicely marked 'NOBUCKL'

 
Lee-Enfield No. 1 nose caps. This takes my tally of these to above 30! :)





And now the Besa find. Rare beast this is........combination tool







Hope you like the finds.

RRPG
 
Far from it. I have hundreds of Sten parts from this dump. I just wasn't digging in the 'Sten area' :)
 
We used to did pit Ft Olgelthorpe, Ga., back in the 1980's, found some Civil War mixed in with WWI, a lot of coins, mostly pennies, 100s of buttons, it was fun.
 
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