Today we have the M93 "Black Arrow" out at the range. I made an attempt to get the scope zeroed enough to be on paper, but was unable to get it there within a few rounds, so most of this video is shot using the rifle's backup iron sights. Perhaps others will have more recoil tolerance to properly...

The kp/31 Suomi submachine gun in Finnish service was an outstanding weapon, but it was slow and expensive to manufacture. When Finnish forces began capturing Soviet PPS-42 and PPS-43 submachine guns form the Soviets in the Continuation War, it was very quickly decided that Finland should copy th...

The Finnish military depended heavily on Maxim machine guns until the 1960s, first using ones captured from the Russians and later starting production at Tikkakoski in the 1930s. One of the difficulties of the Maxim, however, was its mount. Based on DWM commercial mounts, the Finnish Maxim tripod...

The basic equipment of the Finnish Army came from what was left in Finland by departing Russian soldiers when Finland declared independence. As the Russians had no scoped rifles at that time, Finland didn't have any either. The Finnish Army began experimenting slowly with the concept of a scoped ...

When the Finnish Army adopted the m/27 improved pattern of the Mosin Nagant rifle, there was one group of soldiers who were not really satisfied with it. Finland had a cavalry brigade - one of the elite elements of the force - who wanted something more like the German Kar98AZ carbines they had be...

I had a chance to shoot an LS26 once before, but without the benefit of a magazine loading tool – and so I could only get 4 or 5 rounds into the mag. This time, we have a proper loader, and we can give the gun a proper workout. And I’ll also show you how that loading tool works – it’s almost as n...

Finland’s first domestic light machine gun was the LS-26. The prime designer was Aimo Lahti, but because of his relative inexperience and lack of formal credentials, Lieutenant A.E. Saloranta was assigned to assist him. The two did not get along well, and Lahti effectively designed the weapon on ...

Edward Lindner was a Bavarian-born gunsmith who spent much of his professional life in the United States. He was granted no less than 13 firearms patents, and was involved in some very forward-thinking designs. Among other things, he has the earliest patent I am aware of which uses the term "stri...

The Linda is a semiauto 9mm pistol that just exudes 1980s aesthetics. It was made along with a carbine version called the Terry, by Wilkinson Arms of California (later Idaho). Both were named after daughters of the company founder, Ray Wilkinson. He would also later produce a Sherry pistol named ...

The Laugo Alien has survived its mud and sand tests without any long term damage, and now it's time to put it to work. The MGM Spinner has long been my nemesis, and so I bought one to practice on. The advantages of the Alien are immediately evident - I've never been able to double-tap a spinner e...

Next up in our Maserati-or-Hilux assessment of the Laugo Alien, we have a sand test. First a plain, easy sandy soil immersion, and then a horrible bucket of moon dust. So...will it blend?

Today we are taking the Laugo Alien out to the range - let's see if the hype is real!

Is the Laugo Alien a rugged an unstoppable HiLux or a fastidious Maserati? I would like to use it as a go-to competition pistol for matches like Finnish Brutality and Desert Brutality, but first I need to know that it can take some knocks and still run. So, let's do some horrible stuff to it and ...

The Laugo Alien is a pistol developed recently, and only introduced in 2018. Its lead designer was Ján Lučansky, who was also heavy involved in the CZ Scorpion carbine/SMG. The Alien is a significantly different take on modern handgun design than what we are used to seeing. It uses a fixed barrel...

Laser Products Corporation got its start in 1979, with a laser sight mounted atop a Colt Trooper .357 Magnum revolver. Shortly thereafter they introduced a range of other small arms with lasers fitted, including the Mini-14, Remington 870, and AR-15/M16. The whole line was intended for police use...

Around 2013, the UK MoD began looking for a new rifle to replace the Special Forces' L119A1. Those A1 rifles were getting old, and something new was needed - and there was some thought that a new rifle could improve on some shortcomings of the A1 model. The new rifle was produced by Colt Canada (...

---
UPDATE: One correction to make; this rifle has the A2 charging handle. The original A1 version was essentially identical to the standard conventional charging handle. Sorry!
---

In 1999, the UK Ministry of Defense put out a tender for a new rifle for UK Special Forces (UKSOF). The elite...

We looked at the 7.62mm conversion of the No4 Enfield into Rifle L8 yesterday. Part of that program was an attempt to develop a new sniper rifle on the L8 platform. To this end, six good-quality No4(T) Lee Enfield sniper rifles were tested for accuracy, then made into L8 rifles and fitted with No...

After the British adopted the FAL as the L1A1 rifle, there was still an interest in converting stocks of existing No4 Enfield rifles to the new 7.62x51mm cartridge for reserve and training use. A conversion system was developed using a new barrel, bolt, and magazine - although the Sterling compan...

While I was in Finland for Finnish Brutality 2021, I took a day to hitch a train ride up to Isokyrö, about 400km northwest of Helsinki. The Kyrö distillery was founded there in 2012, making single malt Finnish rye whiskey and several varieties of gin.

But I wanted to get a look at the product...

The idea of a thumb trigger in place of a traditional index finger trigger has come up a number of times in firearms history (the Pieri carbines tested in France and Italy, the Winchester Thumb Trigger .22, etc). The most recent iteration (and the first semiauto one, as far as I can tell) is Iron...

The 1880s and 1890s were a fertile period of experimentation with repeating handguns. One such example is this design by Marius Berger, manufactured in France by St Etienne in 1880 and 1881. It uses a ring trigger and a 4-stage cycle in which pulling the trigger sequentially:

1) Opens the bree...

Having worked with the KP-15 for the WWSD2020 project, I got a hankering to know how a tiny SBR carbine would work using a KP-15 lower. There is no option for using a pistol brace, of course so this was built as a registered short-barreled rifle. I used a Faxon 10.5 inch 5.56mm pencil-weight barr...

Correction: Browning invented the pistol slide, but not the overall short recoil system. Maxim was the first to successfully create a short recoil firearm.

Short recoil is the most common system used today in self-loading handguns, and it also used to be fairly popular in machine gun designs. ...