The Kit Pic Thread

Green mugs come up with Arrows from time to time. The last one I saw was a half pint size.
White mugs were alleged to be unpopular after an apocryphal story of a platoon leoparding through long grass being spotted and shot up because of their white mugs giving the game away. Funny the things vets tell you.

Thanks for the advice guys, perhaps i mistook the mugs in the film to be red when they were actually brown ( I know films are hardly the most accurate source of info anyway)

I'm trying to upload a screenshot but photobucket isn't working

i've got a war dept marked green mug, i've had it since soldiering in the 90s and used to use it as a bathroom mug afterwards to keep tootbrush and paste in!

Someone told me the green ones were for the far east but i find that highly unlikely.

I have green with back edging, brown (two shades) and white with blue edging (indian made in this case) mugs...

The green and the brown ones all came from the same £1 box and are all post war dated... or were until the dates wore off.

yeah mines green with black edging

As above, the small white/blue ones are easy to come by, but I prefer the pint mugs as you can pour a full can of beer into them

I got a brown pint mug frtom an army surplus shop, I guess it is a postwar one. Somewhat cheaper than the SOF ones....

Cheers
Martin

Chommers, maybe Blanco & Bull needs a new section....

On to it...

Heh, that reminds me I must get round to my brass cleaning section . And my tests finding the best/longest lasting/quickest way to polish brasses. I have a boxful of stuff but I'm just awaiting some free hours to waste!

quickest way to polish brasses.

So far for me that's been a dremel with polishing disk and brasso... Even gets the hardest to remove black marks off...

Did they have dremmels in WW2? I've just tried and I can't fit mine in the entrenching tool carrier anyway. Perhaps that's why they had large packs?

I'm pretty sure polishing machines were available in factories at the very least...

pretty sure they didn't issue them to the tommies C'mon, get some brasso & elbow grease on it!

Having been in the grenadier guards cadet unit, where drill and uniform were very strict, I believe I can give some advice on cap badge and brass polishing, and the quickest and easiest way I found was getting a cotton pad, putting some brasso on it , and scrubbing the fuck outta it, after that leave the brasso to dry to the point that it becomes slightly sticky and then getting a fresh cotton pad and going to town on it, after you have done that get an old tooth brush, put some soap on it and scrub the uneven bits of the cap badge, i.e. the flames on a grenadier guards cap badge, and i have found thats the easiest way of doing it, and it get out all sorts of muck.

The best way to bring grimy/oxidised buttons and cap badges back to life, that I've found, is a quick spray of Cillit Bang, leave for 5-10seconds, then brush off the lifted dirt with a soft nail brush and rinse in cold water immediately. This reduces all of the chance of removing the detail from conventional 'rubbing' polishes.

Ah but you want that polished till it's worn out look to look like you're an old sweat.

Yup, it was a matter of pride with regular soldiers to have their capbadges and buttons polished down so you could barely make out the insignia.

personally for brasses i tend to soak them in vinegar after removing them from webbing and them polish them after they have had a good soak... takes off most the rubbish.

Ah but you want that polished till it's worn out look to look like you're an old sweat.

Yup, it was a matter of pride with regular soldiers to have their capbadges and buttons polished down so you could barely make out the insignia.

Yeah, but some of us like to not damage 70 year old historic items. It seems a shame, to me, for a cap badge to have kept its detail nicely (albeit under a layer of grime) for 7 decades, only for some bloke to come along with the Brasso and a Dremel, and give it the same relief and contours as a splat of plasticine.

yup i'm with you on that but we're just saying that some deterioration wont look wrong and was how they went with cleaning. Pointing out the extreme of this would be to have blob like detail in the era.

I'm less fussed about buttons being preserved they are not exactly scarce.

Heh, in actual fact if you want to not damage it at all. The only real way is to not clean it at all.

And no, I wouldn't take a rare 70 year old cap badge and polish it to death... but then most of the cap badges we have won't be original anyway.

but then most of the cap badges we have won't be original anyway.

Exactly, which wouldn't have grime on that would need to be polished off.