Original French WWI Inert P1 Pear / Spoon Percussion Grenade – Percutante Grenade Nr.1 Original Items

Original Item: Only One Available. This is totally inert BATF compliant genuine World War One French Grenade Percutante n°1 (Percussion Grenade Nr. 1). These are quite hard to find, and this is the second example that we have had. These were called both the “Pear” grenade due to the shape, as well as the “Spoon” grenade due to the large arming device for the ignition system.

This example has an intact body, lead bottom cap, fuze bolster, and a partial “spoon”. This would normally be connected to the fuze assembly at the top, but this is missing.

A great example of a very hard to find French WWI grenade!

As early as the 17th century, virtually every grenade design, regardless of the fuze, had one fundamental flaw. Any wick type fuze, if not consumed completely by the time it reached the target, meant the grenade could be thrown away, sometimes right at the original thrower, definitely not an optimal outcome. The idea of an impact detonated grenade is there fore pretty old, but its design met a lot of complex problems that were far from being perfectly solved in 1914 by any country.

At the beginning of the war, the French Army used artisanal percussion ‘bangers’, as well as Aasen grenades, from the name of that Danish inventor who was selling the same grenades to the Germans. However, none of these solutions were satisfactory.
However in May 1915, the French soldiers finally received a brand new grenade: the P1 (percutante n°1) percussion grenade, designed and made in France by Billant, who also invented the M1916 automatic lever grenade igniters.

This new weapon was almost immediately nicknamed ‘Pear grenade’ or ‘Spoon grenade’ by the fighters, for somewhat obvious reasons. The grenade was made of a pig iron body with inner fragmentation grooves, closed at its base by a lead plug, and on the top was the igniter. This mechanism was composed of a detonator triggered by a starter that was hit by a moving percussion pin when the grenade landed vertically on its base. This percussion movement was only possible when the spoon-like safety lever was up. A security wire wrapping the spoon lever and the grenade body at rest had to be cut prior to launching the grenade, so that the rotation of the lever was possible.

Unwanted arming of the grenades by rupture of this wire and movement of the aluminum or steel spoon lever caused numerous accidents. Moreover, the design’s requirement of having the grenade landing vertically on its base was problematic as well. The pear shape was supposed to help with this, as was a piece of fabric under the spoon that served as a tail in flight. Despite these two precautions, the results were rather uncertain.

With the dangerous and unreliable ignition system and often poor results from fragmentation, this grenade was hardly a “success”, but was nevertheless made in large numbers. The danger they posed during disarming and storage is why they are so scarce on the market today.