All I know is that it goes *boom* after taking off the pin.
And throw it away of course.
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There is a pin inside that holds the striker in place, when you remove the pin, the striker presses against a part in the grenade that starts a small “fuse” that within about 5 seconds, ignited the materiel inside the grenade, causing explosion. The “shrapnel” (shell) of the grenade causes damage, as well as the explosion causes damage as well
I’m gonna talk about the M67 frag grenade, because it’s the one kind I’ve handled. They’re green and mostly spherical.
The fuse runs down the middle of the ball, and at the top there’s a spring-loaded striker that kind of looks like a thumbtack with the spring attached to one edge. The spring makes it want to whip down, so the pin of the tack strikes the top of the fuse and gets it burning.
When you get the grenade out of the box, that striker is pulled back, ‘cocked’, but it can’t move because the handle (sometimes they call it the spoon) is holding it in place. There’s a pin that goes through the handle, holding it onto the grenade so it can’t move, and in addition to that there’s a little safety clip which also keeps the handle from moving.
When you’re near the range, or near combat, you’ll take those little clips off and get rid of them.
So when you’ve seen something you want to blow up, you hold the grenade so your hand’s around the handle, so the handle can’t move, and now you can pull the pin out. (Could you do that with your teeth? Yeah, I think so, but the pin’s in there pretty snug. I never tried.)
If you changed your mind at that point, you could put the pin back in, locking the handle in place, and everything would be fine. In a pinch you could probably jam a paper clip or something in there and it would do the same job the pin does…as long as it fits well enough to hold that handle in place.
When you throw the grenade, now you’re not holding the handle anymore. The striker’s spring whips that striker around (causing the handle to go flying; it lands on the ground somewhere in front of you), the striker lights the fuse. They told us the grenades had 4.5-second fuses; I suspect they’re designed to be more like 5 seconds and they were giving us a bit of safety margin by saying 4.5.
Around the fuse and the explosive charge, there’s a length of thick wire which is scored every couple centimeters. When the grenade goes off the wire breaks at most of those score points, and the fragments are mostly pieces of wire and also the shattered bits of the grenade casing.
There’s no flame when an M67 goes off. There’s a bit of a flash, but what you really notice is the concussion. They go THUMP and you feel that go through your chest. When I was in the range shack waiting for my turn, there were grenades going off outside and I could feel my pants legs vibrate a little each time.
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