Grenade question again

[coyotejoe]

I posted this question just before the site crashed so I never saw any replies.
 Question:  If you pull the pin on a grenade can you then safely reinsert the pin?
 As I recall from Infantry school in 1960 we were told NO, it cannot be done because the hammer and spoon will move enough so that the holes do not line up. But that was 54 years ago, grenades have changed and my memory is not infallible. Does anyone have more recent or reliable info?

[Lonegun1894]

I was in '00-'05, and we just HAD to test this one.  We tried it with 5 training grenades, the ones with just the ignition mechanism and NO explosive charge and a hole drilled in the bottom.  This is how we did it:  While holding the spoon, pull the pin, reinsert the pin and bend to keep it in, and throw it (just in case).  A couple times we had to wiggle the pin a bit, but we got it back in.  Now here's the bad part.  4 out of 5 did not go off--ONE did.  Now this isn't any kind of an extensive test, so I wouldn't trust it to give a true answer, but a 1 in 5 chance that I will lose parts isn't good enough in my book to trust one of these things.  Be careful, cause some mistakes only get made once.

[m-g Willy]

Pull pin and keep spoon held down!!!!
Put pin back in and you are good to go.
Pull pin and let spoon pop up THROW IT ! THROW IT! THROW IT!!!!!
Once spoon is released the fuse is burning and you got about 4 seconds before it goes off.

[bilmac]

I never carried grenades in Nam because I carried a radio, but I remember guys in the platoon saying that they had put pins back in their grenades after firefights. Now that I think about it it sounds like a reasonable thing to do to throw a grenade that you had tinkered with.

The "new" Viet Nam era grenades also had another safety wire that you had to remove before it would go off. I remember being told seems like a 100 times to remove the secondary safety wire also before you threw the grenade.  We had a kind of doofus kid who threw several grenades in a firefight once and he probably could have ended the fight with any one of them, but he never removed the second safety. I guess the lessons he learned watching movies and the tube stuck better than a red faced D.I.

[ironglow]

  My experience says Ditto to m-g-willy..