Contact fuze
device that detonates bomb on contact with hard surface
A contact fuze, impact fuze, percussion fuze or direct-action (D.A.) fuze (UK) is the fuze that is placed in the nose of a bomb or shell so that it will detonate on contact with a hard surface.
Many impacts are unpredictable: they may involve a soft surface, or an off-axis grazing impact. The pure contact fuze is often unreliable in such cases and so a more sensitive graze fuze or inertia fuze is used instead. The two types are often combined in the same mechanism.
Artillery fuzes
The British Army's first useful impact fuze for high-explosive shells was the Fuze No. 106 of World War I. (illus.) This used a simple protruding plunger or striker at the nose, which was pushed back to drive a firing pin into the detonator. Its ability to burst immediately at ground level was used to clear the barbed wire entanglements of no man's land, rather than burying itself first and leaving a deep, but useless, crater. The striker was protected by a safety cap that was removed before loading, but there was no other safety mechanism.
The simplest form of artillery contact fuze is a soft metal nose to the shell, filled with a fulminating explosive such as lead azide. An example is the British World War II Fuze, Percussion, D.A., No.
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