William Whiting was an engineer who spent his entire adult career with the Webley company, and was responsible for all of their in-house self-loading pistol designs. This work initially focused on a behemoth of a pistol, the Model 1904 intended for military contracts. The gun proved insufficientl...

Eli Whitney Jr., son of the inventor of the famous "cotton gin", ran the Whitneyville Armory for many years, producing a wide variety of firearms until nearly the end of the 1800s. Among other gun produced was the Whitney-Kennedy lever action rifle, based on an action designed by Andrew Burgess. ...

The L85A1 (part of the SA80 small arms family) was adopted by the British military in 1985 as a new generation of small arms to replace the L1A1 FAL (one quick note, where "A1" indicates a revision in American designations, it is simply the first iteration in British ones - there was no "L85"). A...

The Savage is one of the many revolvers that saw purchase and martial use during the US Civil War - and in this case, martial use on both sides. About 13,000 Savages were bought by the Union army and navy, and another 11,000 were sold commercially. Many of those commercially-sold guns were later ...

The Eibar region of Spain is known as the center of a lot of pistol production from WWI through the Spanish Civil War, typically pistols called Ruby clones. Well, the various small gunmakers there were looking to copy more than just the Ruby. They duplicated a number of American and European revo...

The Spiller & Burr was a copy of the 1854 Whitney revolver, made in .36 caliber under contract to the CSA. As with so many Confederate arms projects, many thousands were promised and only a small fraction actually delivered. The Whitney in particular suffered from a lack of suitable materials, wi...

The pinfire system was an early cartridge type which saw widespread use in Europe, but was not widely adopted in the United States. First invented by a French designer named Pauly, it was made commercially feasible by Casimir Lefacheaux. It was Casimir's son Eugene, however, who took the pinfire ...

This CZ Model S rifle is one of many prototypes made between the world wars in Czechoslovakia in an effort to develop a military semiautomatic rifle. Similar efforts were underway in most other countries at the same time (basically every place that had a mature arms industry), and a huge variety ...

The MP 3008, aka Gerät Neumünster, was one of two German efforts to copy the British Sten gun. The first was the Gerät Potsdam ("gerät" meaning device or project; basically project code name), which was a direct copy of the Sten distinguishable only by a marking details and a few differences in m...

Designed by Austrian immigrant Joseph Joachim Reifgraber, this is a prototype gas-assisted short recoil pistol in a .38 rimmed revolver cartridge. While this version did not see any serial production, the Union Firearms Company of Toledo (Ohio) did market a slightly smaller model in .32 S&W (and ...

The Gewehr 1871 was the first rifle adopted by the newly-formed German state after its unification at the end of the Franco-Prussian War. It replaced the decades-old Dreyse needle rifles, and fired an 11x60mm black powder cartridge. It was the first significant rifle designed by the Mauser brothe...

The Tucker & Sherrard (and later Sherrard & Clark) is one of the more interesting Texas Confederate revolvers. The company initially was granted a contract with the Texas state government to provide 100 revolvers per month at $50 each, and took a total of $10,000 of investment capital from the st...

This is quite the eye-catching pair of revolvers...

The Model 1870 Gasser was a behemoth of a pistol designed by Leopold Gasser for the Austro-Hungarian cavalry - it was built around the 11x36mm cartridge used in their Werndl cavalry carbines. This cartridge was a middle ground between rifle a...

The Cochran turret revolver is one of the more common turret revolvers in the US, although that's a pretty low bar, as only about 150 of them were made. Turret-sytle revolvers never became popular on the commercial market because of the potential hazards posed by a chainfire when one has chambers...

The German military used a lot of different small-caliber pistols during World War One, and the Jager is one of the most interesting of them. Its unique design was the result of needing to build pistols for the war effort on machines and tooling that were not suited for pistol production. The an...

Alkartasuna SA was a company formed in 1914 by a handful of disgruntled Astra (well, Astra was still called Esperanza y Unceta at that time) employees. This was a difficult time for the Eibar gun industry - demand was low, their reputation for quality was not good (the lack of a central proof hou...

I had a chance to get my hands on one of the new-production M1 Carbines being sold by MKS Supply under the Inland trademark. These guns have gotten a lot of press recently, and I have been interested in how they might perform. The original M1 Carbine has an interestingly mixed reputation - GIs te...

The Swiss military dabbled in revolvers with their rimfire 1872 model (about 900 made) and the followup 1878 centerfire version (5500-6000 made), but their first large-scale service revolver was the Model 1882, designed by Colonel Schmidt (yeah, the same guy who did the rifles). The 1882 is a 7.5...

The Model 1920 was Star's first locked-breech pistol, basically a combination of features from the Colt 1911 and their traditional Eiber blowback .32 pistols. It was tested by the Spanish Army in 1920, with inconclusive results. The Guardia Civil, however, found it to be suitable and adopted it a...

After a series of pistol trials, Norway adopted a copy of the Colt 1911 in .45 ACP as its standard service pistol in 1914. A license was purchased from FN (while under German occupation, interestingly) to produce the guns locally at Kongsberg, and production ran slowly and sporadically until Germ...

Before adopting the M1891 Mosin-Nagant, the Russian Empire (like most major militaries) used a large-bore single-shot rifle as its standard infantry rifle. In this case, a .42-caliber rifle designed by American General Hiram Berdan (yes, the same guy who invented the Berdan primer). As with other...

Today's firearm is not a normal gun; it is a conversion of a Spencer into a shotgun. My question is, what path did this weapon travel? What did it begin as, and how did it come to be in its current form?

Let's see if we can puzzle this out looking at the evidence in the gun itself...

We have all seen plenty of sporter CETME rifles and civilian HK-91s, but when the G3 was new to the Germany military, there was already an interest in bringing semiauto versions into the US. The Golden State Arms Corporation was the first to do so, with three batches of imports in 1962 (just 3 ye...

Five different companies in Germany produced designs for the last-ditch Volkssturm bolt action rifles, and they were designated VG-1 through VG-5. The VG-2 was developed by the Spreewerke company, and differed from the others in its use of a sheet metal stamped receiver (and consequently a pretty...