The movie industry has always had special requirements for firearms. Flintlocks, for example, can be rather finicky guns for folks to use without practice and care, and that does not work will in a filming environment where a whole scene's setup would be wasted it a flintlock fails to fire proper...

While in Finland for Finnish Brutality 2021, the question naturally arose of how bolt action rifles would fare in the snow. Bloke and Chap from Bloke on the Range decided to find out, and peer-pressured me into doing the same thing with my M39 Finnish Mosin. Thanks to Sako for sponsoring the matc...

How does one keep a flintlock action reliable in wet, riany weather? Well, let’s have a look at a flintlock shotgun designed specifically to be waterproof! This is a Joseph Manton shotgun from about 1815. Manton was not the only smith making this sort of waterproof action, but his is a fine example…

This unique Bergmann Model 1910 was made by Anciens Etablissements Pieper with a grip angled slightly back compared to the standard model. It was also fitted with a square front sight and square rear notch in place of the standard barleycorn style sights. Its serial number (8800) puts it right in...

Most of the historical recognition of Elisha Collier comes from the 1851 and 1852 patent infringement lawsuits Colt files against Wesson & Leavitt and other revolver manufacturers. Colt was claiming these other guns in fringed on his patent, and the defense argued that Colt's patent was invalid b...

Samuel Colt wasn't the first person to invent a revolver, and Artemas Wheeler wasn't either. Today Professor Ben Nicholson joins me to discuss the history of repeating firearms before Wheeler and Collier - a history that goes clear back to the 1500s. From Roman candle type guns like the Chambers ...

Courtesy of esteemed collector Frank Graves, Professor Ben Nicholson and I are disassembling a gorgeous example of a second model Collier revolver today. The Collier really is equal parts art and engineering; half made in the finest British bespoke tradition and half by the newest American machin...

What were the different patterns of Collier, and what was the timeline of their development and production? Today I'm discussing this with Professor Ben Nicholson, author of Headstamp's most recent book, "Clockwork Basilisk". We will start with the original clockwork Colliers, then the standardiz...

Remington introduced the No.7 Rolling Block in 1903, and it was the last pattern of the action to be introduced. They were expensive, hand fitted guns, costing $24 in 1903 (compared to $12 for a standard No.2 pattern Rolling Block). The only reason Remington made them was that they were built on...

Patented in 1868 by Colonel G.H. Money and Mr. M. Walker, this rifle was one of the 10 finalists in the British breechloading rifle trials of 1868. It is a simple falling block system with an internal hammer. In the second set of trials, it proved to be middle of the pack in rapidity of fire (20...

When the German attack into Russia stagnated in late 1942, some areas of the front returned to a trench-and-sniper sort of warfare that was reminiscent of World War One. The German military actually went so far as to design and issue a periscopic tech rifle mount, the “deckungszielgerät” (DZG). S...

The first production of a carbine model of the Trapdoor Springfield was the Model 1870 (excluding 4 prototypes produced in 1868). There was a focus infantry rifles in theTrapdoor program, and just 362 of these carbines were made in 1870. They use the short receiver of the 1870 rifle, a 21 3/4” b...

Germany was the earliest adopter of scoped rifles in World War One, and produced more of them over the course of the war than any other power. After an initial stop-gap effort to scrounge up civilian hunting rifles, a sniper conversion program was adopted by the main German rifle factories. Germa...

The Tokarev is a pistol that does not have much written about it in the world of firearms reference literature - largely because it was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact that many of the. variations. became accessible to Western collectors and researchers. What we hav...

I took my own Finnish M39 Mosin and TT-33 Tokarev to Finland for Finnish Brutality, along with a WWSD-2020 carbine. I've gotten a lot of questions from people wondering how I did that, and the answer is Les Winner, of Polaris Logistics. Les handled all of the paperwork and shipping, and he also j...

Today's Q&A was filmed in Finland, with special guests Mike and Fabien from Bloke on the Range, who came out to shoot the scaled-down Finnish Brutality 2021 with me.

01:48 - Most effective first generation smokeless rifle?
06:04 - Swiss straight pulls ever fired in anger?
06:56 - "Bring back...

Brought to you by Varusteleka and Sako, Finnish Brutality 2021 was run as a much-reduced private event to meet Finnish Covid-19 event size regulations. We only had three stages and 7 shooters, but the full public match has been rescheduled for October 22-24 of 2021!

http://www.Varusteleka.com
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Clement Pottet was one of the original fathers of the modern shotgun shell. He took the work of men like Pauly and developed a paper-walled, metallic-base shell for shotgun use. He had two main French patents on his work, the first in 1829 and a followup in 1855. The shell he designed in the 1820...

When the British military transitioned form the .303 British cartridge to 7.62mm NATO in the 1950s, it replaced the Enfield rifles with the new L1A1 SLR (the FAL) but retained the Bren gun as a support weapon. The Bren was updated to use 7.62mm, in a process more complicated than most people woul...

One of the pieces of feedback the German military got from the invasion of Poland in 1939 was a desire for a squad-level designated marksman in each unit. This would be a man with the best shooting skills of the unit, but not actually a fully trained sniper, and he should be equipped with a light...

00:35 - Automatic rifles in .250 Savage in WW1?
04:21 - Why did stripper clips stay around so long?
07:24 - Modern military responses to body armor
09:17 - M1 Carbine in 5.7x28?
11:08 - Under-appreciated firearms designers
14:28 - Why no rotary cannons until the Cold War?
19:34 - Potential ...

Here's an interesting thought - what if they made the FG-42 in 8x33mm Kurz? Well, they actually did, in very small numbers. The rifle's designer, Louis Stange, actually thought it was a really good idea, and the Heereswaffenamt office converted a handful of first model FG42s for testing, although...

Today I am taking the SMG first pattern semiauto FG-42 out to a 2-gun match to give it a try on the clock. This particular match has two rifle-only stage and one pistol-only stage, so I'll only be including the rifle stages here.

The 1st model FG-42 is a rifle that really just feels like it i...

The early pattern (Type E, specifically) FG-42 is one of the most eye-catching military rifles ever made. Designed to be a universal paratrooper's rifle capable of acting as sniper's rifle, light machine gun, hand-to-hand weapon, and grenade launcher, only 2,000 of this early pattern were ever ma...