In a very tense scene in a Vietnam war movie (Platoon?) the protagonist is on forward watch one night when the shadowy figure of an enemy soldier slowly emerges from the misty underbrush and approaches him. Our guy glances down and realizes that if he lunges for the rifle at his feet that will provoke the attack on him. At the last second his sergeant spots the intruder, grabs a Claymore detonating device and pumps it three times until the Claymore explodes, unleashing a furious firefight.
From this scene I thought that the Claymore required several squeezes of the M57 detonator to fire it. But I was recently studying the Claymore system and can readily see that the M57 detonator is just a cheap magneto spark device and the mine itself just requires a blasting cap to be inserted in a socket.
Is the scene confusing or wrong or am I remembering it wrong?
Is this the scene you’re thinking of? I don’t see anyone with a detonator, but there’s three flashes as someone yells “motherfucking claymore”.
Of course, I’m sure there’s other edits of it that may show someone hitting it three times or setting of three mines.
ETA, it’s cued up, check your sound, it gets loud right away.
In another movie, maybe a Western, there is a funny scene involving an old fashioned dynamite detonator, the wooden box with the T handle coming out the top. Pulling the T handle up preps it and when you plunge it downward the magneto spins and the dynamite explodes. In this scene, after their careful setup, the guy pulls the T handle up and the explosion occurs immediately to their surprise.
For some reason, I remember that being in The Monuments Men. But google searching fails to find it.
Also in the clip from Platoon, Sheen is trying to set off the claymore, but a veteran is yelling for him to take the safety off. So, yeah. He was pushing that handle A LOT for no effect.
That is significantly more range, both forward and backward than I expected. For those that didn’t click on the link, the forward impact zone is 300 meters! Rearward danger zone is 16 meters unless the mine is strapped to something that can fragment and blow back, in which case it’s 100 meters backwards
I did a post a year ago about an incident at the North/South Korea safety zone that nearly flared into a war. At least one US soldier was killed. When the North Koreans massed as a show of force they were met with a wave of South Korean soldiers who stripped off their tunics and revealed that they each had a Claymore mine strapped to their chest! In fear and awe the North Koreans withdrew. That’s some serious dedication.
Official M57 (among other anti-personnel mines) instructions can be found here:
IIRC in actual training, soldiers were instructed to squeeze the detonator several times. This was because it was a non-battery-powered, piezo-electric device, and the first squeeze may not set it off. Multiple good, sharp squeezes in quick succession would ensure detonation.
The blast wave goes everywhere, but the steel projectile fragments are arrayed on the front face of the mine, and those are the things you want to send toward the enemy. The blast wave can kill or injure in your direction over a relatively modest distance (in this case, 16 m as @Pork_Rind reports), but the fragments continue for a long distance toward the enemy after the blast wave that launched them has dissipated, much like a bullet continues long after the propellant that launches it has dissipated.
I watched a video taking one apart and fixing it. When you press down the handle past a certain point a steel bar snaps up and completes the magnetic field. When you release it the bar snaps back down, collapsing the field and generating a 3 volt pulse. Not much to it. The magnets lose strength so most of the surplus ones have to have the magnets replaced and the case is not designed to be taken apart.
