First produced in 1902, the Madsen was one of the first practical light machine guns, and it remained in production for nearly 5 decades. The Madsen system is a rather unusual recoil-operated mechanism with a tilting bolt and a remarkably short receiver. The most unusual variation on the system w...

Celebrating our 40th episode with a live fire video featuring a replica Gerat 06(H), the rifle that began the roller-delayed blowback dynasty which has included Spanish CETMEs and German HK's like the G3 and MP5. Developed by Mauser engineers from the gas operated Gerat 06, it produced a much lig...

Sold for $23,000 (transferrable).

The 20mm Oerlikon automatic cannon was a mainstay of United States naval air defense during World War 2, and today we will look at a few of the characteristics and questions that apply to this sort of automatic cannon but not to typical small arms. Like, for i...

It was clear to British weapon procurement in the mid-thirties that war in Europe was fast approaching. Britain, in its haste to adopt an aircooled machine gun for its tanks and AFVs turned to the Czech ZB-53. However, with the time constraints of a rapidly approaching conflict, this .303 variant...

In the 1930s, Britain sought to replace the ageing Vickers and Lewis guns in its aircraft arsenal. The trials winner was the Browning .303 but the War Office wanted a number of changes to the off-the-shelf weapon, including a substantial increase in the rate of fire. Famously mounted in the Hurri...

The Villar Perosa is one of the first small machine guns developed and used by a military force. It was designed in Italy and introduced in 1915 as an aircraft weapon, to be used in a flexible mount by an airplane's observer. The gun consists of two independent firing actions mounted together. Ea...

America's first assault rifle? Well, it does meet all the requirements - select-fire, intermediate cartridge, and shoulder-fired. It was never actually fielded, though.

The Burton Light Machine Rifle was developed during World War One, with the firing model completed in 1917. It was intended as ...

In November of 1950, the US Ordnance Department requested an improved version of the Browning 1919 air cooled machine gun for use in tanks. The new version was to be able to feed from either the left or right, a feature which was unimportant for an infantry gun but much more relevant when mountin...

Maxim lMG 08/15 Zeppelin Gun

Welcome to Forgotten Weapons! Today we have an LGM 08/15 to look at - the aerial version of the German Maxim 08/15 infantry machine gun. This example was made at Spandau in 1916.

The Type 97 was a copy of the Czech ZB-26 machine gun which was used in early Japanese tanks and tankettes. It is chambered for 8mm Mauser, and uses standard ZB-26 20-round magazines. This particular one is in the collection of the owner at Battlefield Vegas, a machine gun rental range in Las Veg...

John Browning’s original Model 1895 gas-lever machine gun was still in production by Colt when World War One broke out. It was not the most modern gun around by then, but it was available - and that was the most important feature for many potential buyers. Colt, however, had a lot of other larger...

Darne was a French gunmaker best known for sporting shotguns, but they entered the military arms field during World War One. The Lewis Gun was one of the best Entente aircraft guns, and Darne put a licensed copy into production in 1915, making a bit more than 3,000 of them by the end of the war. ...

I have had several people send me this video, showing a Ukrainian shop converting PKT machine guns to an infantry configuration. The PK machine gun is used in a lot of Russian armored vehicles, but in vehicular form it uses a solenoid trigger, and doesn't have a pistol grip or shoulder stock. The...

One interesting specialized version of the Steyr MPi-81 is this model, built for the Steyr/Saurer 4K 7FA armored personnel carrier. The vehicle could carry 8 infantrymen and their compartment had four firing ports fitted with MPi-81 SMGs. The changes required from the standard MPi-81 pattern were...

Britain began the process of replacing its Vickers aircraft machine guns with a new Colt/Browning design in 1935, with its adoption of the Colt MG40. This was essentially John Browning's air cooled M1919 machine gun made smaller and lighter, with an increased rate of fire, and reversible feed dir...

The DWM company in Germany had a license on the Maxim gun design prior to World War One. They produced the rather old-fashioned MG08 for the German army, but also wanted to have a modernized type of gun for commercial sales. This was the Model 1913 Parabellum, with the design improved by Karl Hei...

The M231 Port Firing Weapons was developed in the 1970s as a part of the M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle Project. A modern relative of the WW2 Krummlauf, the weapon was intended to provide close-in firepower against infantry that might attempt to overrun the M2. It has no sights or buttstock, and fir...

Prior to the Winter War, Finland had just a few armored vehicles; mostly armored cars. These needed some armament, and one idea put forth was to fit an m/31 Suomi to a ball mount inside a vehicle. This required simply designing a specific shroud for the barrel to fit the mount (as well as the pis...

The MG-17 is a belt-fed 8mm machine gun that was used on a large number of Luftwaffe aircraft early in World War II. The gun was developed by Rheinmetall through its subsidiary in Solothurn, Switzerland (as a way to evade the Versailles Treaty restrictions on arms development). The basic action i...

The MG-15 was the first standard flexible-mounted aircraft machine gun adopted by the Luftwaffe in the 1930s. Both it and the MG-17 are evolved from a Rheinmetall/Solothurn design which would also become the Austrian and Hungarian M30 infantry light machine guns. As used by the Luftwaffe, the MG1...

The Reibel Modele M31 was the variation of the French Chatellerault M24/29 light machine gun made for use in vehicles and fortifications. In accordance with that role, it lacked a buttstock or sights (these were integrated into the vehicle or fortress mounts), was fitted with a very heavy barrel ...

In 1918 the United States began manufacturing tanks for the war effort in Europe, and these tanks naturally required armament. The British were mostly using the Hotchkiss Portative for they new tanks and the French were using the Hotchkiss 1914 heavy machine gun. The initial American weapon of ch...

Development of the .50 caliber Vickers guns began during World War One, but stagnated after 1918, and was not really completed until the early 1930s. At that point, Vickers produced a series of the guns for use primarily as armored vehicle armament and for antiaircraft use. It was formally adopte...