These are interchangeable and are used for sets of equipment adapted for Officers, certain W.O.s., N.C.O.s and personnel armed with pistol, or ranks not carrying arms. They consist of a “gate” slide for attachment to the waistbelt, with narrow webbing fitted at the top to carry a buckle for the brace, below which a link is provided to receive the free end of the brace.
Surprisingly for Indian manufactured webbing, the cotton webbing part of these brace attachments is well made and quite solid. The nature of the design results in multiple layers of webbing folded over each other and sewn which might explain the relative rigidity of this piece compared with much Indian produced webbing. The brass fittings are a little cruder than you would see on English made pieces, here the gate buckle has definite imperfections in the brass that are visible, although they would not affect the strength of the brace attachment in use: The buckle and loop are also a little crude, being stamped from heavy gauge brass sheet: The back of the brace attachment is marked ‘Bata 1943’: This mark is a little faint, but gets more visible when tilted in the light. Bata seems to have produced webbing up until 1943 so this would have come from their final year of production. For more information on this company please check out the post here. Sadly I just have the one brace attachment so far, two being needed for a set. Like all Indian webbing though these brace attachments are not that easy to find so I feel lucky to have picked this one up and I will keep my eyes open for a second.
This entry was posted in 37-webbing, India, Webbing, WW2 on May 4, 2018 by hatchfive.
Waterbottle Carrier- Consists of a framework with tabs at the top fitted with a snap fastener for securing the bottle, and a buckle each side for attachment to the ends of the braces (when desired).
In design then the carrier matches pre-war production. The difference comes with the buckles which instead of being made of brass are made of bonderised steel which give them a distinctive matt-black finish: Bonderisation is a chemical process where steel is passed through a phosphate solution, this leaves a layer of crystalline zinc phosphate on the surface of the metal that prevents corrosion and gives the metal its dull black finish. This has the advantage of being far cheaper than the old brass fittings, but not rusting like a pure steel buckle would. Clearly the finish was only suitable for flat stampings such as buckles as the press stud on the top of the carrier is made of brass, but enamelled black: The webbing with a blackened finish was given a special stores code to distinguish it from the older webbing, either CN/B/XXXX or CN/XXXX/B. The webbing code is stamped on the inside of the water bottle carrier in black ink: Post war 37 pattern webbing is largely ignored by collectors as it is unsuitable for World War Two impressions and collectors seem to have a natural bias towards that conflict. Consequently post war 37 pattern webbing with black fittings is considerably cheaper than webbing with brass fittings and is usually found in near-mint condition. Going forward I would quite like to build up a set of this bonderised webbing and hopefully I can bring you more components as I acquire them.
This entry was posted in 37-webbing, British Army, Post WW2, Webbing on February 8, 2018 by hatchfive.