I had this relic T.Mi.43 laying around, and a part of it was quite damaged. I decided to make something kool with it rather than get rid of it so I made it into a sectioned mine. It was cut with a angle grinder and stripped of paint. Next I filled some deep pitting with car body filler,sanded it smooth and attached the bottom part. When the glue had cured I primed the thing and then filled the insides with some foam and then painted it the colors I wanted. I copied the text from a complete mine and cut a stencil which I then sprayed onto the cut-away piece.
Hope you like it :)

From my collection here is three heavily battledamaged beltbuckles. We can only imagine what caused these damages. The HJ and Heer buckle were found in the Kurland Kessel, while the SS buckle found in SS Nord positions in Karelia. None of the buckles shown were found with soldiers remains.

Some of my denazified belt buckles, often referred to as "Partizan buckles". Often Red Army soldiers and Partizans took such buckles,scraped off the swastika and wore them on their belt.
Belt buckles are a great collectible as they tell a story , comes from many different producers and they dont take much place.

A small selection of German wartime lamps and torches. These came in a wide variety and from many producers which make them interesting collectibles. Some were fuelled with parafin or kerosene, some with karbid and some used battery.

The last two seasons searching the battlefields in Kurland we ve found lots of interesting bits of metal. and a few of these bits I was lucky enough to bring back home to the coffeetable.
Last summer we were in Priekule searching some heavy fought over positions and the ground there was full of shrapnel of all sorts. I dug a large piece which looked like the usual artillery shrapnel, and I happen to collect large bits of shrapnel too, but when I turned the piece over I notice rifling going along it and understood it came from a gun barrel. Probably a PaK cannon as the metal isnt`t very thick. I ve cleaned the part with electrolysis and covered it in wax and it is now residing on one of my shelves.

We also found bits of different shells and one seemed to fit the barrel nicely:

On one of the trips I made to Kurland in 2015 we found ourselves searching a small patch of forest close to a farmers road. That day I had no luck finding anything, but one of the other diggers found several pieces of a blown up Panzer. The explosion had to have been massive as the thick armored sides of the tank had been ripped to small pieces, and its ammo had been thrown out over the forest. One of the pieces he dug out was a chunk of its barrel, just some 30 cm of it and some meters away we found a pit full of different 75mm shells,most of them damaged from the blast and one was perfectly cut in half. The digger gave both these bits to me and later I managed to bring the very heavy bits back home.
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​Usually I never restore or meddle with relics other than cleaning and preserving them, but I felt this German 75mm Panzer barrel and shell deserved to be something more than just some rusted items. I got the idea from some pics I saw from a Polish museum. I removed the wax covering and treated the parts with rustkiller before I primed and painted them and when the paint had dried I gave it all a coating of clear matt laquer.
Hope you like the result:)

A few random finds that got with me home from a visit to a WW1 battlefield matched perfectly to give an illustration of how some grenades are put together. Makes a nice little installation on the display shelf too.
The base is from a 77mm grenade and all the shrapnel balls dug around on the battlefield and given a light clean.

Probably the finds from this summer I love the most as I find beauty in twisted destroyed old war machinery. In Priekule I dug out what I thought was a piece of artillery shrapnel, and was overjoyed when I turned it around and saw the rifling on it The positions we were searching had changed hands 17 times during the fighting in 44/45.
 Later in the summer we dug a dumping pit in a German frontline position and a friend found the 75mm panzer penetrating grenade head. Together these bits make an exellent table decoration:)

Earlier this spring I found this German cable reel half buried in the forest. Ofcourse I dug it out and brought it home. The spool was full of wire which had to be cut off to be able to clean the reel, anyway the cut off wire was overgrown with moss and small roots going all the way to the core of the reel and it was probably post war wire so not a big loss.
I rinsed it with water and threw it in a bath of oxalic acid and kept scrubbing until I couldnt get off any more rust. The result was quite pleasing, alot of the original color was seeing daylight again. I covered the whole part with the restoration wax I`ve made and then put on some of the red communication wires I ve been digging out in both Norway and Kurland, so now I just need to find a place in the workroom to display it.

A few interesting fieldmade EKMs. The first one is from a "HiWi" - Hilfswilliger. The middle one is a Stalag tag with some engravings on the back. The last one is also a Stalag tag, a German EKM with the sides cut of to make it look square.