Sandy write:
The Sunday San Francisco Examiner had an article about how simple it is to make a pipe bomb. It was syndicated from the Dallas Morning News. In the article a "federal bomb expert" opined:
They're probably one of the more common explosive devices that are encountered. That's because the pipe not only provides a container, but fragments into sharapnel." ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Now I don't know what takes to qualify one as a "bomb expert," but the standards must be pretty low. The reason hand grenades look like pineapples is because it's very difficult to get metal to fragment unless it is scored or otherwise predisposed to come apart in little pieces.
This is no longer true with respect to hand grenades and was not really accurate wrt the old pineapple grenades. Modern grenades are pre-scored to produce good fragments, in fact one reason for abandoning the old grenades was that they fragmented into only a few large chunks along the weakest stress lines of the pineapple gripping and this did not produce the desired effect (which is lots of little high-KE pieces, four or five big pieces with relatively low-KE were produced by the pineapple grenades...) An equivalent effect for a pipe bomb would be produced by mixing in a handful of brads, wire cut into 5mm lengths, or tacks, most "recipes" for such devices I have seen tell someone to mix in nails. This is really stupid if you consider that most people only have relatively big nails sitting around and coupled with the volume restriction of a pipe bomb you will get the same poor effects as the old hand grenades. jim