Colt-Jolidon Prototype Pistol

The 1883 Colt-Burgess was the Colt company's single, brief endeavor to enter the lever action "cowboy" rifle market. Winchester had been making some moves to break into Colt's lucrative shotgun and pistol markets, and Colt reacted by hiring noted gun designer Andrew Burgess to design them a rifle...

This is a factory prototype of the Colt's entry into the Offensive Handgun Weapon System as requested by US SOCOM in the early 1990s. It featured a rotating barrel locking system, double action trigger system (with manual safety and decocker), and single stack 10-round magazine. Only about 30 wer...

In 1897, John Browning patented four different types of automatic pistol - a blowback type that would become the FN/Browning 1900, a gas-operated type similar in concept to his 1895 machine gun, a rotating-barrel type, and a swinging-barrel type. It is this swinging barrel design that would have ...

The All-American 2000 was Colt's attempt to break into the polymer high-cap pistol market in the early 1990s, when Glock was dominating that field. Colt took what appears to have been a pretty good pistol designed by Eugene Stoner and Reed Knight and made some pretty terrible decisions when adapt...

The Colt model 1903 pocket hammer is based of of the 1902 sporting model, which is in turn a civilian market variant of the Colt 1900. Like it's immediate forerunners it is a .38acp chambering, of course not to be confused with the later .38 Super, more on that later. It's a locked breech design ...

Colt .380 Prototype Pistol

This double-barreled sporting rifle made by Christoph Funk in Germany is not much like the typical over-under double-barreled rifle. It began as a fairly standard Mauser bolt action, chambered in 7x57 Mauser with a 5-round magazine and a nice double-claw scope mount. What Funk added to this was a...

Many unique and interesting pistols were made in China in the 1920s and 1930s, and this pistol is a good example of them. It is not a copy of any specific Western handgun, although mechanically it works like a Mauser 1914 pocket pistol. It is chambered for .32ACP (the other common caliber for the...

"The Protector" was a very discreet palm pistol developed in the late 1800s by a French inventor, produced in bulk by the Ames Sword Company, and sold by the Chicago Firearms Company. They are mechanically double-action turret revolvers with a unique grip design meant to be to be fired by squeezi...

I had the chance to play with a friend's new Chiappa Triple Threat at the range last week, so I took the opportunity to put together a video. It was intended for a different website, but they already have someone reviewing the gun - so I figured I might as well post it here. It's not a forgotten ...

http://www.armorplatepress.com

Most of the books I look at are primarily text-based, and today I figured we should do something a little bit different. Armor Plate Press, run by Tom Laemlein, specializes in photographic studies of various weapons (and vehicular) topics. Today's book is The Yan...

I have been procrastinating the addition of a good book on the M1 Garand rifle into my own library, reading the various published material off of friends' shelves. Now I'm glad that I have put off the purchase, because hot off the presses is a new tome by Bruce Canfield, a 900-page encyclopedia o...

Ludwig Olsen's Mauser Bolt Rifles is one of the foundational reference books on the Mauser rifle, and deserves a place in the library of any bolt action rifle enthusiast. Olsen studies the rifle from its early single-shot, black powder beginnings through its ultimate expression as the Model 98, a...

Today we're looking at one of the most recent additions to the Collector Grade ensemble: Tim Mullin's MAGNUM: the S&W .357 Magnum Phenomenon. It's a very good history of one of American's iconic handguns.

Good news for everyone interested in collecting Italian military firearms (yes, both of you)! Ralph Riccio has just recently published a new book on Italian Small Arms of the First and Second World Wars. Until now, there have been very limited options for English-language books on Italian guns, a...

I picked up a copy of this book a couple years ago when Bin Shih first published it, but by the time I got around to doing a review it had sold out - so I didn't bother. Well, a seconds printing run has been made, so it seems that now would be a good time to take a closer look at it. There are ve...

The 37mm gun was found in many guises during World War One - that caliber was the smallest allowed to use exploding projectiles by the 1899 Hague accords. Every nation in the world, it seems, used 37mm guns of one type or another. Well, one particular version I had the chance to look at was built...

Today we're looking at an example of a cheap pocket pistol from a century ago - a 6-shot Belgian revolver chambered for .22 Short (sometimes called a Velodog revolver because of their use by cyclists to ward off dogs). Scads of these type of guns were made, often with no markings beyond the lega...

The M1898 Rast & Gasser revolver was the last iteration of a series of revolvers, and was a standard Austro-Hungarian sidearm during WWI (despite the adoption of the Steyr M1912 selfloader). The M1898 an often underappreciated handgun, with a number of useful features and a very high standard of ...

Australian Vickers gun converted to 7.62x54R (so we can shoot cheaper ammo). Water-cooled, and when it gets hot it boils the water and vents steam. This is why the military used hoses and condensing cans - so the jet of steam doesn't give away your position!

Many people are aware of the .45 caliber Lugers made for US military field trials - but far fewer people realize that Lugers were both tested by the US military and sold commercially several years prior to the .45 tests.

In 1900, the US military put several hundred 7.65mm Luger pistols into fi...

The AKU-94 was a bullpup conversion kit made for standard AK rifles by
K-Var a while back. They were never particularly popular, probably because
in stock form they weren't particularly good. The sights are wobbly and
mediocre, the triggers were awful, the magazine was a very tight fit, and
t...

We had the privilege of spending a couple days last week in Florida, attending the first of many seminars to be held by the Institute of Military Technology on firearms history and design. This particular seminar focused on two topics; Dutch trials rifles from 1800-1900 (presented by Mathieu Will...