MP3 Hand Grenade

hand_grenade_mp3

One man’s useless machine is another man’s treasure… or something. [Matt] shared a link to his MP3 gr3nade in the comments of our useless machines post. The project took a decomissioned hand grenade and shoehorned an MP3 player into it. His decision to locate the headphone jack where the safety pin goes is a nice touch.

This reminds us of the boss from a previous job who had a chrome plated hand grenade on his desk.  Now that was a useless object (and a useless boss). This project actually does something, but are you really going to ride around on the subway rockin’ out to the Bee Gees while holding a hand grenade?

30 thoughts on “MP3 Hand Grenade

  1. that is NOT a decommissioned hand grenade. it’s a cheap china knockoff that is simply cast and poorly cleaned up.

    I have a real one and several of those cheapie gag/novelty fakes. They dont even use those in army training.

  2. I hate to agree with someone calling themselves fartface, but I think he is correct. However, it does not diminish the awesomeness of this at all. I totally hate the real ones. Damn near killed myself in basic with a trainer. Never was great at throwing things. Nice post.

  3. It is not decommissioned but it is also not a Chinese knockoff. It is a practice grenade, the red paint on the spoon indicates that it was used and recovered. I would guess that the other side of it has the letters RFX cast into the body. The RF means that it was cast at Richmond Foundries and the X indicates that it is a practice grenade body.

  4. Cool, brings back memories…

    Just gotta be cool with that in public though, you could easily get hammered by “the man” just because some moron THOUGHT it was real.

    Now if you put it in a vibrator and activated the motor with the audio, you’re gf would really start to appreciate your classical music collection. :)

  5. I have that exact same type of drilled granade in my room I’ll have to try this one

    I bought mine in a army navy surplus for like 2 bucks. I would think its real there was still powder residue, you could smell it in there. They also cemented the firing pin, they’re pretty heavy, could knock someone out with one lol.

  6. I used a hack saw.

    Just dropped the grenade into a bench clamp and hack sawed it open along the lines.

    There’s more pics of the build process on my flickr page that’s linked off the NYCR article. The sansa was the best fit for the grenade… but rewiring the buttons on it is a giant pain. I do wonder if there’s a better choice of mp3 player.

    I just noticed this made hackaday =P been busy. I’ll respond in comments for the next few days or until I’m sufficiently satisfied this is “old news”. I mean this is a 9 month old project after all.

  7. Farthead, what do you think they precision CNC machine ‘real’ grenades from solid prime stock as opposed to ‘cheap casting’? Every deactivated grenade i’ve seen looks like this, cast and roughly cleaned up. It’s military. It’s only there to make fragments of metal. If you have a pristine non-cast looking one then YOURS is the fake. Spot a real one by the fuse being struck and residue inside. A copy wouldn’t go to those lengths.

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