I'd heard some negative things about today's book before I picked up a copy, and I was happily surprised by its usefulness. The book is German Pistols and Holsters 1934/1945, by Major Robert D. Whittington III. It is a pretty straight-forward work, written to aid collectors and historians in unde...

Grant Hammond is best known (to the extent he is known at all) for a .45 caliber pistol submitted to US military trials in 1917 and 1918. This pistol is a proof of concept prototype embodying some of the concepts that would go into the later .45 caliber pistol, and also showing some concepts that...

Before he adapted it to .45 caliber for US Army pistol trials, Jens Schouboe was building his pistol design in .32 ACP (7.65mm Browning). It was a blowback action, hammer fired, and very quick and easy to field strip. The gun was reliable and well made, but just didn't catch on in the market, and...

Nicholas Pieper designed a blowback pocket pistol which was manufactured under license by Steyr in 1908. It was a reasonably successful pistol, and can be found today in .25ACP and .32ACP calibers. This particular one is an experimental version scaled up to .45ACP, with the intention of making mi...

This is an excellent book to start a firearms library with. It has a lot of great information for a very affordable cost - I found my copy for $3 at a gun show, but it can be bought on Amazon for not much more.

Elmer Keith's No.5 Single Action Army is arguably the most famous custom revolver ever made. Keith had it built in 1928 after developing a friendship with Harold Croft, another revolver enthusiast. Croft had shown Keith his own custom revolvers, which he had numbered 1 through 4. Croft had been t...

Josef Nickl was one of the chief R&D designers at Mauser after the Federle brothers, and one of his pet projects was a rotating barrel military pistol developed from the Steyr-Hahn M1912 pistol. He built a number of prototypes of it while at Mauser, but the company never put it into production be...

Needlefire rifles were developed in the 1830s and represented and early effective type of breechloading rifle. As such, they were adopted by both German and French armies - but only in rifle form. Needlefire handguns were much less common. This particular design was patented in 1852 by a man name...

We interviewed Duncan McCollum, author of "Japanese Rifles of WWII". He showed us some interesting aspects of a Japanese Type 2 paratrooper takedown rifle. These guns are like regular Type 99 Arisakas, but can be quickly disassembled into two piece for carrying in a leg bag when parachuting.

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...

During the late 1920s, it looked like the German Army was going to replace the P08 Luger with a less expensive sidearm, and several major German companies developed prototype guns to meet this anticipated need. The replacement ended up being postponed for nearly a decade (the P38 would be the eve...

In an effort to take advantage of Jim Bowie's popularity, George Elgin patented a huge knife attached to a single shot percussion pistol in 1837. The idea was simply to offer a dual-purpose weapon, and it proves that human nature never does change much. I suspect that in actual use the weapon wou...

During the 1950s, the US Army ran a series of programs trying to find a better solution for infantry rifles than firing single semiauto bullets. These projects (including SALVO, SALVO II, and SPIW) would include experiments with multiple barreled rifles, burst firing rifles, flechette firing weap...

One of the many revolver systems designed to work around the Rollin White patent was the Pant's Patent cupfire revolver, made by Merwin & Bray in several calibers (.28, .30, and .42). This particular example is a nice on in .42 (which is the diameter of the cartridge case; the projectile is actua...

The Colt House revolver, better known as the Cloverleaf (and sometimes as the Jim Fisk Model) was the first revolver Colt designed from the ground up for rimfire ammunition. It entered the market in 1871, and was only made for about 5 years. It's colloquial name came from its unusual 4-chamber, ....

This month, Karl and I both shot my new Walther G41 rifle for the 2-Gun Action Challenge Match. I picked up this rifle from the recent RIA regional auction, and it had been missing a magazine and had thoroughly worn out recoil springs. I replaced the springs and found a magazine on eBay for it. W...

Having gone through the whole series of Thompson submachine guns, now it's time to take them out to the range! I was quite curious to see how the different variations would handle side by side, since they have several significant differences. The Cutt's Compensator and the changing rate of fire c...

Thanks to the folks at SMG Guns in Texas, I just got my completed semiauto Bren gun in 7.62x39mm. What the best way to break it in? Take it to a run-n-gun match, of course!

First off, the front grip is a repro experimental piece made by IMA - it would not originally have been on the gun, but I...

The Mars pistol was designed by Sir Hugh Gabbett-Fairfax in England in 1898, and only 81 were produced by the time manufacturing ended in 1907. These pistols were chambered for several different cartridges, all of them tremendously powerful for the day (and really not equaled by another self-load...

For this month's 2-Gun Action Challenge Match, I decided to try using my Yugoslav M76, in 8x57mm. The M76 is one of the triad of eastern marksmen's rifles - the PSL, the SVD, and the M76. Like the PSL, the M76 is mechanically just a scaled-up AK - but made to a much higher standard of fit and fin...

In 1963, the US Army set out to purchase 85,000 AR-15 rifles as a one-time procurement to hold the infantry through until final adoption of the expected Project SPIW rifle. Where the previous Air Force purchases of the AR-15 had been simple over-the-counter transactions with Colt, the scale of th...

I've been taking a lot of big pistols to the (alleged) BackUp Gun Match, and I figured it was time to try out something that actually would quality as a back-up gun. So, I got my hands on one of NAA's .22 Mini-Revolvers. This is the smallest practically shootable "real" gun made, and they are rel...

A little while back during the summer I went to our monthly Backup Gun Match with, of all things, a Taurus Curve. Why do I even own one of those? Well, I found one new in the box at a local gun show for less than $200. Because it is such an unusual gun in a bunch of ways, I figured it really dese...

I have been able to bring you a bunch of videos of guns with Ethiopian connections over the last few months thanks to InterOrdnance, aka Royal Tiger Imports. They have purchased essentially the entire stock of obsolete arms in Ethiopian stockpiles and brought them to the collector market here in ...