EDIT: Shoot, I managed to get the gear ratio backwards. Sorry! The recoil action provides the necessary delay, and then the gear ratio provides acceleration to ensure the bolt can open reliably, akin to the accelerator in a Browning M1917 or 1919 machine gun, or a Lahti L35 pistol. Please excuse ...

"EROP" was a small company based in Paris, which produced about 18 submachine gun prototypes between 1954 and 1956. These were submitted to French military trials in several different configurations first in 1954 and later in 1956, and none of them were given any further consideration after that....

The Vigneron was Belgium's standard submachine gun during the early years of the Cold War. It was originally adopted as the M1 in 1953, and about 21,300 were made. In 1954, several modifications were made, resulting in the M2 pattern. Many of the original M1s were converted to M2 specification, a...

Yesterday we took a look at the vz.52/57 rifle in 7.62x39mm, and today I have one of it's 7.62x45mm predecessors out at the range. Not so much to do some shooting, as it turns out, but to fix malfunctions and wait for hangfires and duds...

However, we did have enough success to put some 7.62x45m...

The Madsen LMG was first introduced in 1902, and it is still in use with police forces in Brazil today. The Madsen was not very popular with major European armies, but it sold extensively in South America, with Brazil acquiring batches in 1932, 1935, and 1949. These were converted to 7.62mm NATO ...

I really enjoy finding guns that can be positively traced through multiple different parts of history, and Lugers can be a great source for that sort of story. Today I have a Luger from Royal Tiger Imports that has an incredible amount of history to it...

The upper assembly of this Luger was bui...

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, CZ started exploring more commercial export options for its guns. In addition to resurrecting (well, attempting to) the vz.64 Skorpion in 9x19mm, they also developed a selective fire version of their landmark CZ-75 pistol. Production began in 1995,...

We don't need the SKS, we have gun designers at home! In the early days of the Cold War, the Czechoslovak communist party was on very good terms with Josef Stalin, and were able to design and use their own small arms. A whole new slate of small arms were developed in the early 1950s, with a rifle...

Today I'm speaking with retired Master Sergeant John Keene, the NFA export for Morphy's. John is a machine gun collector himself, and between this and his work with Morphy's he has exceptional experience and expertise. So we have a slate of questions for him from Patrons:

0:00 - Introduction
0:2...

The Maxim Gun was the first successful true machine gun, and it became extremely popular worldwide. Maxim sent his first two working models to Enfield for testing in 1887, and by 1889 he had what he termed the "World Standard" model. No two contracts were quite identical, as the gun was constantl...

The Colt Model 1903, aka Pocket Hammerless, aka Model M, was a massively successful design for Colt on the commercial market. It was chambered for the .32ACP cartridge, with a .380 model introduced in 1908. During World War Two, the US government took an interest in the pistol. A total of 17,330 ...

The Portative was an attempt by the Hotchkiss company to make a light machine gun companion to their heavy model (which had found significant commercial success). The Portative used the same feed strips, albeit loaded upside down, and the same gas piston operation, but a very different locking sy...

Venezuela was the First Nation to purchase the FN-49 rifle, before even the Belgian military. In fact, the Venezuelan contract was signed in 1948, before the "FN-49" designation was even in place. Venezuela bought a total of 8,012 rifles in two batches - 4,000 rifles plus 12 cutaway training exam...

Charles H. Ballard is much better known for his single shot rifle design, but he also designed, patented, and produced a .41 rimfire caliber derringer. These were popular concealed weapons during the 19th century, and remain in production even today (though no longer in .41 rimfire...). Productio...

The Breda Model 37 was Italy's standard heavy machine gun (which meant a rifle-caliber gun fired only from a tripod) during World War Two. It was chambered for the 8x59mm cartridge, as Italy used a two-cartridge system at the time, with 6.5mm for rifles and the heavier 8mm for machine guns to ex...

Cossack forces have long been a key cavalry element of the Russian military, and this did not change during the Soviet era. The Cossacks had their own rather distinctive style of sword, the shashka, and the Red Army maintained the tradition of issuing them to Cossack cavalry troopers. In 1927, a ...

Contrary to what you might expect, Mauser was actually the last company to produce a fully automatic model of the C96 "broomhandle" pistol. The C96 was very popular in China (Mauser sent hundreds of thousands of them to China) and Spanish firms like Bestigui Hermanos and Astra jumped at the chanc...

When Colt decided that it wanted a piece of the Derringer market, it used a tactic we are used to seeing today: it found an existing manufacturer and just bought them outright. This was the National Firearms Company, which was manufacturing a Derringer designed by Daniel Moore in 1861. Moore made...

FN played a role in the production of Polish wz.28 BARs, and in the process obtained a copy of the technical package for the weapon, and converted it to metric measurements. Under the supervision of Dieudonne Saive, this was used as the basis for FN's own BAR production, called the Modelé 30. Pro...

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...

The “Guycot” is a rocket ball chain rifle system named for its two creators, Paulin Gay (the designer) and Henri Guénot (the financier). They patented the idea in 1879, and manufactured it in both rifle and pistol form - I have a previous video on one of the pistols and today we are looking at tw...

During the Croatian Homeland War - as in all wars of independence - a wide variety of cobbled-together firearms were used by people who could not access proper factory arms for one reason or another. Today I'm as the Sisal Municipal Museum looking at four different examples from specifically the ...