Post WWII Development
The Bangalore continues to be used today in the little-changed M1A2 version, primarily to breach wire obstacles. British Royal Engineers, Canadian Combat Engineers and Infantry Assault Pioneers along with American combat engineers have also been known to construct similar field versions of the Bangalore by assembling segments of metal picket posts and filling the concave portion with plastic explosive. The PE is then primed with detonating cord and a detonator, and pickets are taped or wired together each to make a long torpedo producing shrapnel that cuts the wire when detonated. This method produces results similar to the standard-issue Bangalore, and can be assembled to the desired length by adding picket segments.
The newest evolution of the Bangalore is the Bangalore blade, an updated version made from lightweight aluminum and using explosively formed penetrator technology to breach obstacles which the original Bangalore would have been unable to defeat. In a test detonation conducted on the television show Future Weapons, the Bangalore Blade blasted a gap roughly 5 meters wide in concertina wire, and created a trench deep enough to detonate most nearby anti-personnel mines. The Bangalore Blade was developed in the United Kingdom by Alford Technologies and is intended for use with both standard army and Special Forces units that require a lightweight, portable obstacle-clearing device.
Read more about this topic: Bangalore Torpedo
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