The Sig AMT was the commercial version of the PE57 military rifle. They were built in 7.62 NATO and used a roller-delayed blowback system very similar to that developed by Germany during WWII and used in the StG45 and HK91 series of rifles. The AMT is built to typical Swiss standards of quality, ...

Today we have some video of a British 1918 Farquhar-Hill rifle at the range. This rifle was an early semiauto design that was accepted by the British army too late to see service in World War I, but was used as an observer's weapon in two-seater British aircraft. It is chambered for .303 British ...

Today we take a look at Iain McCallum's "Blood Brothers: Hiram and Hudson Maxim: Pioneers of Modern Warfare" - a book deserving a place in everyone's firearms library. Most people don't realize that Hiram Maxim was a creative and technical genius, and the machine gun was one one of his many notab...

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.

I've been promising this range video for a while now, and here it is. We took all three configurations of the C96 Broomhandle Mauser - a pistol, a carbine, and a machine pistol - out to the range for some comparisons.

Today we have a video from a range session with a 1914 Lewis Gun in .303 British. We disassemble the gun and do some shooting. The Lewis was a staple light machine gun for the British Army in the First World War, and a pretty nice gun to shoot.

Austria was a hotbed of early repeating handgun design, first with manually operated designs and shortly thereafter with self-loaders. One of the men contributing to this development in the 1880s was Josef Schulhof, a farmer-turned-gunsmith who had a number of patents and designs to his credit. H...

The Leader Dynamics T2 was produced in Australia with the intent of getting a military contract to replace the Australian military's FAL rifles. It did well in testing, but not well enough to be adopted. The rifles were available on the civilian market in both Australia and the US for a short tim...

Today we have a British Hotchkiss Portative machine gun in .303 caliber to look at. These were used by everyone on the Allied side in WWI, and were a reliable and effective gun, if not the simplest design.

The Gerat 03 was the first prototype roller-locked rifle developed by the Germans during WWII. Only a few were made, and the rifle was never put into mass production. This is the direct ancestor of the HK91 family of roller-delayed firearms.

Quick, think of the first thing that comes to mind when I say "riot shotgun"!

Does it have a brass buttplate? A tangent rear sight? Is it a single-shot weapon? Does it use a shotshell smaller than 28ga?

No? Well, I guess you have a different notion of riot gear than the Indian military. Huh...

We had the opportunity to disassemble and reassemble a Russian Fedorov rifle. The footage is a bit on the dull side, but I don't know when we'll have a chance to recreate it, so I edited this video together for the time being.

This past weekend was another 2-Gun Action Challenge Match, and this time I decided to shoot my Hakim in it. The Hakim is an Egyptian license-built copy of the Swedish AG-42 Ljungman (you can find more info on the Hakim and other Egyptian rifles here), chambered in the standard 8x57 Mauser cartri...

The Mannlicher was one of the early automatic pistol designs. Like most such guns, a small number were made as carbine variants. This particular one is the first prototype 1901 carbine (you can see the number '1' stamped on the bolt).

We take a 1940 Bren gun to the range to demonstrate function, disassembly, and shooting from a variety of positions.

Forgotten Weapons is joined by author Bin Shih, an expert on Chinese firearms of the second Sino-Japanese War (aka World War 2). We discuss the state of Chinese weapons manufacture in the 1930s and 40s, as well as several specific weapons including Mauser-type bolt action rifles, grenade launche...

The FN FNC carbine was developed for military trials in the 70s and 80s, and saw some limited success.

German ordnance began looking for a military selfloading rifle to augment the K98k as early as the 1930s, although the pressures of war initially made that development a second priority. By 1941, though, two competing designs from the Walther and Mauser companies had been developed to the point o...

I borrowed this book from a friend to take a look through, and not I really don't want to give it back. I always buy myself a book or two after Christmas, and this is definitely what I'm getting myself this year. It's expensive, but worth every penny. Everything in here is excellent - the depth o...

I was at a gun show recently and found some unusual Mosin-Nagant rifles, but didn't know enough to identify them and gauge their value. So I bought them just in case, and then I picked up a copy of Terence Lapin's The Mosin-Nagant Rifle. It was a pretty useful book to me (and my Civil Guard marke...

We have another interview segment with Bin Shih today, this time discussing the commonly used bolt action rifles that were the backbone of the Chinese infantry during the war with Japan. Specifically, Hanyang rifle, the Manchurian Mauser, and the Chiang Kai-Shek rifle (aka Type 24).

When we spoke to Bin Shih about his recent book and Chinese firearms in general, he brought several interesting guns along to show us. By far the rarest was a General Liu rifle, and we decided to devote a complete episode to it. It's definitely a forgotten weapon, and we appreciated having the ch...

I've discussed the much-maligned CSRG machine rifle (the Chauchat) previously - it was not the utter disaster that common knowledge would lead you to believe. You won't find much literature on the Chauchat, but fortunately what has been written is of top-notch quality: Gerard Demaison's and Yves ...

We've all seen the books of compiled articles at gun shows, printed by Gun Digest or other sundry magazines. I usually don't give them a second glance, at least until now. I had a friend point out this one in particular, International Arms Review 1. Printed in the late 1970s, it is a lot more int...