When the Spanish Civil War erupted, the Nationalist/Fascist forces quickly captured all the major arms production factories in the country. This left the Republican forces dependent on arms importation and the creation of new factories. The two major efforts to make weapons in Republican-controll...

The Moore patent "teatfire" revolver was one of the more (no pun intended) successful workarounds to the Rollin White patent. Designed by Daniel Moore and David Williamson, the gun was a 6-shot .32 caliber pocket revolver which used a proprietary type of cartridge. It was loaded from the front, a...

While US infantry forces during the Civil War had only limited access to the newest rifle technology, cavalry units adopted a wide variety of new carbines in significant numbers. Among these were a design by Benjamin Joslyn. It first appeared in 1855 designed to use paper cartridges, but by the t...

After the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Hungarian army was armed primarily with Steyr M95 straight-pull rifles and carbines, chambered in the 8x56mm rimmed cartridge. In 1935 they adopted a new Mannlicher turnbolt rifle, the 35M, which used the same 8x56R ammunition and en bloc clip...

There are rarely any truly original ideas in the gun world, and today's "pistol" ARs and AKs are not among them. Back in the 60s and 70s, companies were marketing the "Enforcer" M1, a pistol version of the WWII M1 Carbine. Of these two, one is made of military surplus parts by Iver Johnson and on...

When the Dutch military adopted the M95 Mannlicher rifle, they made a rifle for standard infantry, and a variety of carbines for specialist troops. these included artillery, cavalry, bicycle, engineers, and colonial service carbines. During World War I they attempted to standardize these and redu...

In 1855, Colt introduced a new revolver unlike the others in their lineup - it was a side-hammer design with the cylinder stops built into the axis pin instead of the cylinder. They then proceeded to scale the design up into revolving rifles and shoguns in several calibers. The revolving shotgun ...

The Chassepot was the French answer to the Dreyse needle rifle, and also the only other needlefire rifle to see major military service. It was adopted in 1866 and served as a primary French infantry rifle until being replaced by the 1874 Gras rifle, which was basically a conversion of the Chassep...

A new set of videos will be starting next week, and one of them covers the family of three related Hungarian WWII rifles: the 35M, 43M, and G98/40. I figured that some folks would be interested in just a tutorial on their bolt disassembly without sitting through all the other material, so I decid...

The Remington Model 8 is a sporting rifle designed by John Browning that first came on the market in 1906 (as the Remington Autoloading Rifle; the name was changed to Model 8 in 1911). It is a long recoil action, meaning that the bolt and barrel remain locked together as they travel more than the...

The mitrailleuse was one of the early types of mechanical machine gun, along with the Gatling, Gardner, Nordenfelt, and others. "Mitrailleuse" was originally a general name for a volley gun - one with many barrels in a cluster, which are fired sequentially (it now means heavy machine gun). The tw...

(Unfortunately, Tombstone Territorial Firearms has closed up shop since this video was published).

I had a chance to do a video on a Portuguese contract AR-10 made by Artillerie Inrichtingen in the Netherlands a little while back. Unfortunately, it had just sold, and so we didn't have an oppo...

Most people are familiar with the Type 38 Arisaka, which was one of the two very distinctive Japanese rifles of World War II (along with the Type 99). The Type 38 was an outstanding rifle in large part because it was the result of several years of experience and development which began in 1897 wi...

The Murata was Japan's first domestic manufactured military rifle. In its first iteration, it was an 11mm, single shot, black powder weapon and was adopted in 1880 (the Type 13). Before long, some problems in the design were discovered, and the Winchester company helped to resolve them. Wincheste...

The Slocum revolver, designed by Frank Slocum and manufactured by the Brooklyn Arms Company, was one of the more successful workarounds for Rollin White's patent on the bored-through cylinder. The most significant advantage of Slocum's design was its use of standard .32 rimfire cartridges, unlike...

The Palmer was the first bolt action firearm adopted by the US military - it was a single shot rimfire carbine patented in 1863 and sold to the US cavalry in 1865. The guns were ordered during the Civil War, but were not delivered until just after the end of fighting, and thus never saw actual co...

The Khyber Pass is a region near the Afghan/Pakistan border known for firearms production - particularly for very crude guns made with crude tools. This particular pistol is an excellent example - it looks like a Colt 1911, although it is smaller and more akin to a .32ACP Llama. It is a straight ...

Made in Naubuc Connecticut, the Hammond Bulldog was an interesting single-shot rimfire .44 caliber pistol. It used an unusual rotating breechblock, and had the potential to be a fairly strong action. Reportedly prototypes were made in a wide variety of calibers, including a carbine version with a...

During WWI, the German army issued about a half million sets of trench armor, often called grabenpanzer or sappenpanzer. Despite common belief, this armor was not intended for trench raiding - in fact, German orders regarding it specifically prohibited this use because of the amount of mobility l...

This particular Chinese pistol is a great example of all the elements of a proper Chinese Mystery Pistol: sights that don't function, gibberish markings, mechanical derivation from the Browning 1900, aesthetic elements form the C96 Broomhandle Mauser, and clearly handmade parts. However, it is a ...

The Campo-Giro was Spain's first indigenous self-loading military pistol, adopted in 1912 to replace the Belgian 1908 Bergmann-Mars. Only a small number were made of the original M1913 variety, with the vast majority being the later and slightly more refined M1913/16. This particular example is ...

Ethan Allen was a very prolific gun manufacturer in the US, being involved with a series of different companies. This particular rifle of his appealed to me because it is an excellent example of how many different clever elements can be in something as simple and pedestrian as a single shot rifle...

The 1907 Dreyse is an early automatic pistol whose design is attributed to Louis Schmeisser. It saw fairly extensive use by the German military during World War I, and was also used by various German police organizations into the early 1930s. Overall, nearly a quarter million were manufactured.
...

This is a replica 1860 Army with a 5.5" barrel, in .44 caliber and using true black powder. Footage shot at 2000 fps. Note the delay (6 frames / 0.003 seconds) between the cap detonating and the powder charge igniting.