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9mm Sintereisen bullet for Stahlhelnabnahme

D

dutch11

Senior Member
Gentleman,

I have absolutely no knowledge of German helmets.
But if you want to do some testing, perhaps it is interesting to know the Germans had a special cartridge to do this.

A 9mm Para with a Sintereisen bullet for Stahlhelnabnahme.



Kind regards
 

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Thank you Dutch! This post was well worthy of its own thread.
Regards,
HB
 
Let me get this straight, they shot sintered iron bullets at helmets for quality control/acceptance purposes? Whoever came up with this test must have taken a good hit of Pervitin that morning.
 
GK, that was a standard method of testing the ballistic qualities of helmets back then. I think we used the .45 acp cartridge for this. We may still test this way. The rounds were fired at various angles on the test helmets to test batches for steel properties and such. Go to 2:00 in the reel below:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dqyaOvXvSnE

 
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Hambone said:
The rounds were fired at various angles on the test helmets to test batches for steel properties and such.
Click to expand...

Ahh, this part was confusing to me. Normally, repeatability is the #1 priority for a test, otherwise the test is statistically meaningless. That's why test fixtures are used in most engineering disciplines. Shooting at a helmet from different angles, unless done out of a fixture, results in random ricochets bouncing off without doing a lot of harm. The bullet hitting the helmet perpendicular to its surface will cause the maximum damage as there are no deflecting forces. Usually tests like that would be done in a guillotine-type fixture with a drop weight.

Anyways, thanks for the explanation. An old dog learned a new trick today...
 
Very interesting - thanks for posting - always good to learn.

I have seen pictures of the sintered iron bullets for the 8mm Kurz - but I don't think they were for field testing purposes.
 
Helmets were not really meant to protect the wearers from bullets. They could, if the shooter was using a handgun or aiming a rifle at a certain angle where the bullet glanced off. Helmets were primarily meant to protect the wearers from flying dirt, wood splinters, rocks, and shrapnel during artillery attacks.
 
That's probably why they developed this round. I don't think they wanted to test if the helmet was bulletproof. They did wanted to be sure it could take a certain amount of impact. Maybe you could compare it with shooting a helmet with a breaching round? A lot of impact but almost no penetration.
 
Yes, a 9mm test round likely loaded to slower fps and penetration than a standard 9mm, but enough to replicate most fragments and shrapnel. The test from the newsreel shows what appears to be a fixed bolt action likely chambered for this test round at a fixed distance striking the helmet at a consistent angle. They likely tested a certain number of helmets in each lot (hence the helmet lot numbers stamped in the rim) in this manner. I think the regs are in the Baer helmet book.
 
Hambone said:
Yes, a 9mm test round likely loaded to slower fps and penetration than a standard 9mm, but enough to replicate most fragments and shrapnel. The test from the newsreel shows what appears to be a fixed bolt action likely chambered for this test round at a fixed distance striking the helmet at a consistent angle. They likely tested a certain number of helmets in each lot (hence the helmet lot numbers stamped in the rim) in this manner. I think the regs are in the Baer helmet book.
Click to expand...

They probably ran some tests with helmets subjected to artillery bursts, then correlated the results with range tests with these special bullets. Very fascinating.
 
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