The Danes were the first military to adopt the Krag-Jorgensen rifle, with this infantry variant in 1889. It is chambered for the Danish 8x58R cartridge, which was also used in Remington Rolling Block rifles (although the Krag loading is more powerful than that of the Rolling Block). Unlike the No...

One of the options for having multiple shots available in the age of the muzzleloading rifle was the swivel-breech rifle. Such a rifle would have typically two barrels and one lock - one the first barrel was fired, the whole barrel assembly could be rotated 180 degrees to bring the other barrel i...

This is one of the more practical knife/pistol combinations I have seen - it actually has a pretty reasonable grip when used in either capacity. It has two muzzleloading smoothbore barrels, with a percussion cap hidden under each top ear of the crossguard and a folding trigger in the body of the ...

Before the Type 14 Nambu pistol was developed to replace the "Papa" Nambu, Kijiro Nambu experimented with a high-capacity design with a 15-round magazine. This pistol was called the Type A Experimental, and was designed around 1920. Only 15 or 20 were made, and they show elements of both the Papa...

The Winchester Thumb Trigger rifle was a very inexpensive boy's rifle developed from the Model 1902. It is a single-shot .22 rimfire bolt action system, on which the trigger was replaced by a thumb-activated sear behind the bolt. In theory, this was to allow greater accuracy by requiring less for...

The pinfire system was a popular type of early self-contained metallic cartridge in Europe, but didn't find much use in the United States. Pinfire revolvers were made in a variety of calibers from 5mm up to 15mm, and a much smaller number of revolving rifle and carbines were also made. This parti...

James Reid was a Catskills gunsmith who emigrated from Ireland by way of Scotland. He made a number of different revolvers, but is best known for his line of "My Friend" knuckleduster pepperboxes (or "knucklers", as he called them). At the height of their popularity, Reid had 17 employees, and ma...

The Sisterdale revolver is one of the most original designs of the Confederate revolvers. It was devised by a group of Texans led by one Alfred Kapp, son of a German immigrant in Sisterdale, Texas. He and his compatriots made six of these revolvers on the Kapp homestead with the intention of obta...

The pinfire cartridge was a popular development in Europe in the mid-1800s that never saw much exposure in the United States. A huge variety of pinfire revolvers were made by a myriad of large and small shops, with Liege Belgium being one of the biggest manufacturing centers.

Guns ranged from ...

We often hear the phrase "hand-fitted" in regards to either really finely made guns, or ones made before the the advent of truly interchangeable parts. Well, I recently had a firsthand experience with hand-fitted parts, and thought it would make an interesting video. i suspect a lot of people tod...

What is that unusual revolver that Ed Harris' character is carrying in the new HBO show "Westworld"? It's a modern cartridge conversion of a Confederate LeMat grapeshot revolver. Pretty cool!

In a Q&A video a month or two back, I was asked what modern rifle I thought would be best for a soldier in WWI trench warfare. My answer was an AR-15, and I got a lot of people asking why. Well, because the AR is a more reliable rifle in really bad mud than the AK.

What I couldn't show at the...

The G33/40 was made by the excellent Czech factory at Brno under German occupation (between 1940 and 1942). It was essentially a copy of the Czech vz.33 carbine, and was specifically issued to the Gebirgstruppen (mountain troops). It is easily distinguished from a typical Mauser by a couple chara...

When I was waiting for my copy of Anthony Vanderlinden's new book "FN Mauser Rifles" to arrive, I was expecting a typical sort of dry reference work. You know, the sort of thing that is essential for looking up details like the serial number range for a specific contract, or the sling swivel loca...

Okay, so the name may not be considered very PC today - you could also call this a cross-dominant stock. The concept was to allow a shooter to mount the gun in one shoulder but sight with their opposite eye. This was useful for cross-dominant shooters (ie, right handed but left eyed) or shooters ...

In recent months, a couple of interesting developmental varieties of AK mags have appeared on the market here in the US, and I figure folks might be interested in learning about the history of where and when they came from, and why they were used or not used. So today, we will look at the progres...

Final hammer prices from the Rock Island December 2016 Premier auction. These all include the 15% buyer's fee.

This cute little pocket pistol was an early project of Vaclav Holek, who would become much better known for his work with the ZB-26 light machine gun and ZH-29 rifle. It is a very small .25ACP selfloader, intended to be operated with one hand only. The trigger locks into a folded position to allo...

Devisme of Paris was one of the early manufacturers of a true centerfire cartridge revolver, with production of this model beginning in 1858 or 1859. This is a bottom-break 11mm, 6-shot revolver, made to a very high standard of quality. Devisme also made a variety of other guns, including indoor ...

The famous American jewelry company Tiffany & Co has a long history of offering decorative firearms, and today I'm looking at two of them. One is a cartridge conversion Colt from the 1870s, engraved by Nimschke and fitted with a silver-plated Tiffany "Mexican Eagle" grip. The other is a modern-pr...

This revolver looks like it is a Smith & Wesson DA from the early 20th century, right down to the S&W grips. However, it is actually a Spanish Eibar-made copy, and you can tell when you take a close look at the patent markings atop the barrel. Instead of "Smith & Wesson, Springfield, Mass, USA", ...

One of the less common accessories for Colt percussion pistols is the original factory shoulder stock. And far less common still is the factory stock made with a canteen inside it! The stocks were made of two pieces of wood pressed together over a pewter drinking water canteen in the center of th...

The Crossfire MkI is a combination gun - both a rifle and shotgun with the two barrels sharing a single pump action mechanism. The shotgun is a 12ga bore, with a 4-round tubular magazine located on top of the buttstock. The rifle is a 5.56mm NATO barrel feeding from a bottom-mounted AR-15 pattern...

We humans have built pretty much everything into weapons over time, and here's an example of that. There are a variety of types of key pistols in existence, varying from the elaborate and complex to the ones as rudimentary as this one. This example is simply a large(ish) key with the stem hollowe...