The Lewis Gun was developed by American Isaac Newton Lewis shortly before WWI, but the US military was not interested in it (in part because of a bitter dislike between Lewis and the Chief of Army Ordnance Crozier). Lewis instead licensed production to BSA in England, and the gun because a major ...

The MG-34 and MG-42 machine guns were the mainstay of German infantry (and vehicle) firepower during World War II, and it will take several videos to properly cover them. For now, we are shooting them both, and explaining how to load, unload, and operate them (including changing barrels on the M...

Brief clip shooting a round from a Solothurn S18/1000. Note that in normal use, the gun ejects cases automatically. The owner here had disabled the ejection in order to preserve the brass - that's why the manual unloading was necessary.

The Colt 1903 Pocket Hammerless was a very popular pistol for civilians - it was compact, comfortable, reliable, and exceptionally modern for its day. The initial production was all in .32ACP, but 5 years after it was introduced a variant in .380 caliber was introduced - the model 1908 Pocket Ham...

The firm of Sedgley Inc of Philadelphia was a gun company involved in many aspects of the industry. They made rifle barrels for the US military, they made the rather goofy "Glove Guns" for the US Navy, and they did a lot of commercial gunsmithing, including high-quality sporter conversions of mil...

This is a presentation I gave to the Arizona local AFTE (Association of Firearm and Toolmark Examiners) group in February 2015 discussing some of the uses for high speed camera photography of firearms. Specifically, this presentation was based on the Edgertonic camera I have been using for about ...

The Sedgley Glove Gun was one of the goofiest projects actually funded by the US military during WWII. Designed for the Navy, it was basically a leather gardening glove with a single shot .38 S&W pistol attached to the back. A plunger fired the gun, and the idea was literally that the user would ...

I am getting high speed footage of a bunch of interesting pistols right off the bat now that I have my Edgertronic camera, and one that has been on my list ever since I first shot it was the blow-forward Schwarzlose 1908. It's a very fast action, and my initial attempts at high speed a year or tw...

This is a Belgian-made Schulhof bolt action rifle. It is notable for its 9-round rotary magazine, and this same model of rifle was tested by the US Army in 1889. The magazine and overall design of the rifle was found to be quite good, but the bolt was too weak for Army approval. Regardless, it is...

Prototype Savage .25 ACP pistol.

We have another new unique item today - a prototype pistol made by Savage in .38ACP caliber.

The Model 320 Revolving Rifle was one of Smith & Wesson's least successful commercial products, and as a result has become one of the most collectible of their guns - less that a thousand were ever made. The problem with the guns was the same problem that has plagued virtually all other revolving...

The Roth-Sauer is a rare early automatic pistol designed by Karel Krnka, financed by Georg Roth, and manufactured by J.P. Sauer & Sohn in Germany. It is mechanically quite complex - much moreso than strictly necessary.

The action is a long-recoil type, in which the bolt and barrel remain locke...

See more photos and a full description at:

https://www.forgottenweapons.com/early-semiauto-rifles/anonymous-blishross/

The Remington Model 8 (and the 81, which is mechanically identical) was an early self-loading rifle design by John Browning, and was produced from 1906 into the 1950s. It was available in 4 calibers initially, all of them being rimless, bottlenecked proprietary jobs - the .25, .30, .32, and .35 R...

The P66 was a prototype .22LR semiauto pistol designed by a German immigrant to the United States by the name of Rolf Dieckmann. It never went into production, but had a number of interesting features, including a removable firing mechanism and a combination extractor and firing pin.

(FYI, the Yugo M92 in this contraption is a registered SBR, which allowed us to not create an illegal item by taping it to a rifle)

When the US military decided to seriously look at replacing the 1903 Springfield with a semiautomatic service rifle, two designers showed themselves to have the potential to design an effective and practical rifle. One was John Garand, and the other was John Pedersen. Pedersen was an experienced ...

While we normally stick to small arms here, this beast of a gun was just way too impressive for me to not pay attention to. I was at a cannon and machine gun shoot just recently where some folks brought out what is (I believe) the only functional Pak-40 in the United States. And shot it.

The P...

There is a fair amount of debate as to whether these are authentic WWII German artifacts, as opposed to post-war creations to feed the market for Nazi memorabilia. Authentic or not, they are a very neat mechanism to take a look at.

The "My Friend" knuckle-duster revolver was a defensive weapon sold on the civilian market from the late 1860s until the early 1880s. It functioned both as a revolver (this one is in .22 caliber, with a 7-shot capacity) and a blunt weapon for striking. These were made in upstate New York (in the ...

The Soviet Union produced more sniper rifles during WWII than any other country, and was one of very few to have a well-developed sniper program in place before the war began. Starting in the early 1930s, they developed a sniper variant of the standard M91/30 infantry rifle, with technical assist...

The MKb-42(H), or Maschinenkarabiner-42 (Haenel), was the first production iteration of the German Sturmgewehr. It was chambered for the then-new 8x33mm kurz cartridge, and fired both semiauto and full-auto from an open bolt. Approximately 11,000 of these were made before production changed to th...

Note: This video was filmed over a year ago, but I have been holding it in anticipation of the rifle going to auction. That doesn't seem to be happening, so I'm posting the video now.

Only three example of this 1925 prototype rifle from MBT (Metallurgica Brescia gia Tempini) were ever made, an...