Nambu World: 2006 Cartridge Show Display

On November 4, 2006 I exhibited a display of Japanese cartridges for the first time at a small cartridge show in Edmonton, Alberta, about three hours’ drive north of where I live. The show was very small (about 20 tables), but as far as I know it is the only cartridge show anywhere near where I live. The next closest one I know of is in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Here is me with my Nambu World mug. I was wearing a matching T-shirt, but I needed to keep my vest closed to keep warm, so you can’t see it. My display was very simple. I hope to do something more creative next year, but this time I barely had time to get things labelled.

Here is the first case starting on the right. There are a couple of Hotchkiss-type T-92 feed strips, Arisaka stripper clips, pistol ammo boxes, a Type 89 knee mortar round, Type 88 and Type 91 fuzes, and a 25mm round (the big stuff is all deactivated to comply with Canadian law). At the bottom is a manual showing original trajectory data for the 6.5mm cartridge in the Type 38 rifle.

The second case had post-war ammo boxes, an 8mm Nambu mould, .22 calibre conversion kit for a Type 14, snap caps and an ingenious apparatus to swage .32 bullets up to 8mm and .25 bullets up to 7mm. They were kindly sent to me by prominent German collector Gustav Rackebrandt.

I displayed the small arms cartridges in trays I bought at a lapidary shop. I got the divider inserts from the Military Historical Society of Canada, which sells them as a fund raiser (they also sell the trays, but since the tops are glass I thought it more prudent to buy locally and avoid the risk of breakage in transit.. The inserts come in several different colours. Besides the 20- and 35-compartment ones shown here, there is also a 12-compartment type that is just right for medals. Here’s what was in the trays: front right-handgun cartridges; front left-6.5mm Arisaka cartridges made by Japan and the UK; rear left-6.5mm cartridges from China, Sweden and the USA. The rear right is double-stacked. One tray is comparison cartridges for the handgun calibres and the other is comparison cartridges for the rifle calibres.

The last row of trays has the 7.7mm rounds in the front tray and machine gun rounds in the rear tray (7.7mm semi-rimmed, 7.7mm rimmed and 8mm). It also has a rare piece of spent 11mm Murata brass dated 1882 in the lower right. The pins you see in an empty compartment in each tray go in through the sides to hold the top and bottom of the trays together.

Here is a close-up of the handgun calibre tray, with a few rounds slightly askew from handling (I have to figure out a way to keep them from moving around while still allowing them to be removed for study. I put double-sided tape on the backs of the labels to hold them in place. One thing that attracted interest was the many sectioned rounds I had in the trays. They were done for me by my friend Paul Smith.

There were no prizes to be won or anything, but I had a good time chatting with the other exhibitors and the small number of public visitors who braved the cold to come out for a look. I knew many of them, as the gun world in Alberta is pretty small.

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Last updated: November 10, 2006. All contents are copyright Teri unless otherwise specified and may not be used elsewhere in any form without prior permission.