Yesterday we took a look at the inner workings of the VHS-2, and today we are going to put some rounds through it. I am trying out both a short-barreled VHS-K2 that was limited to 2-round burst (for French police trials) and a full-length VHS-F2 from French military trials.

Overall, I quite l...

Accuracy International's L96A1 was a stunning success in British military trials, and became the basis for one of the most respected line of precision rifles in the world. However, it very nearly was abandoned almost as soon as the first rifles were delivered to the British military in 1986. Prod...

HS Produkt of Croatia makes an interesting modern bullpup rifle, the VHS. The rifle has gone through several major design iterations in the past two decades or so, and the most recent version (the VHS-2) was part of the competition to replace the FAMAS in French military service. It ultimately pl...

0:00:00 - Intro
0:02:05 - Why no Madsen LMGs in WW1?
0:06:26 - MG34 use post-WW2, and Norwegian rechambering of the MG34
0:10:40 - Post-WW2 use of the MG42, and comparison to the MG5
0:13:34 - Difference between prototyping and troop trials
0:17:45 - Modern handgun to use 7.65mm French Long...

The stalwart No1 MkIII "Smelly" served the United Kingdom well during the First World War, but by the 1920s it was growing obsolescent. The war had revealed a number of shortcomings of the design, and in the interwar years the British developed a replacement. The main issues that the new rifle wo...

Thanks to Thomas for sending me a couple of these clips to try out!

Huzzah! I finally have a chance to take a proper full-auto FAMAS F1 out to the range. My conclusions? It's very nice, just like the semiauto civilian model. It has a limited 3-round-burst option for those who need it, but also unrestricted automatic for those with enough practice to use it. The g...

Today we are looking at a Chinese Type 56 RPD, but we will be focusing on the basic design and why it was adopted in the Soviet Union rather than the details of its use in China. The RPD was the result of research into reduced-power cartridges to replace the 7.62x54R for infantry use. While that ...

Thanks to Legacy Collectibles, today we have a unique Colt prototype pistol to look at today - a double-action variation of the 1911. Judging by the grips and markings, this was made in the late 1950s - but I have been unable to find any documented record giving details. The double action capabil...

John Moses Browning is, without argument, the greatest firearms designer in history. While we have had many brilliant designers who had their names forever connected to guns (Maxim, Luger, Kalashnikov...), Browning invented whole categories of firearms. Gorenstein's new book "The Guns of John Mos...

Having taken a look at the history and mechanics of the P90 yesterday, I'm taking it out to the range today. I wasn't sure how I would feel about the progressive trigger...

The M1 Garand ran great in testing, but as soon as Springfield began to crank out production-line guns a mysterious problem appeared. If the top round in the clip was on the right-hand side, the 7th round in the clip would often run askew and malfunction. Where did this very odd problem come from...

FN began developing the P90 in the late 1980s, actually preceding the NATO requirement that it would eventually compete for. The idea of the P90 was to develop a weapon for secondary troops to replace 9mm pistols and SMGs. There was an anticipated threat of Russian paratroops wearing armor that c...

When John Browning developed the self-loading shotgun that would become the Auto-5, he decided to depart from his existing standard business relationship with the Winchester company. Browning had historically sold his patents to Winchester for a flat fee, but with his new shotgun he decided he wa...

Henry Chan of 9 Hole Reviews was a big help to me throughout the writing of Pistols of the Warlords, helping me translate a variety of really interesting Chinese markings we found on various pistols. So when I decided I wanted to translate the title of the book into Chinese to embellish the back ...

Isaac Abadie's gate-loading system was a significant improvement in revolver technology in the 19th century, and Portugal was one of the first to adopt it. The initial Portuguese model was adopted in 1878 specifically for officers, and this was expanded in 1886 to a longer-barreled version for ca...

The Vickers company developed several versions of the Vickers machine gun for aircraft use during the 1920s and 1930s, but they also worked on armored vehicle versions of the gun in the 1930s. Between 1930 and 1936 these were adopted by the British military as the Mk IV through Mk VII guns, but t...

William E. Fairbairn is best know for his work with Eric Sykes and their ""Commando" knife design during World War Two. However, Fairbairn spent some 33 years in the Shanghai Municipal Police, working his way up from a beat constable to Assistant Commissioner. There he was responsible for the SMP...

It came out recently that the Beretta Group has purchased Chapuis, the French manufacturer of the legendary MR73 revolvers. A bunch of people have asked me if I'm getting one of the Beretta-imported guns, and the answer is YES! But it's not here yet.

So while I wait for it (a 5.25" Sport model...

Finland's standard light machine gun going into the Winter War was the LS-26, a gun which did not succeed in field use. It was complex and cumbersome, and Finnish troops quickly replaced it with captured Russian DP-27 LMGs. Part of the problem of the LS-26 was it's recoil-operated design. Finnish...

We were going to have a couple serious military vehicles as range props for Finnish Brutality back in February, but with the match postponed because of covid restrictions that didn't come to pass. However, Jari (CEO of Varusteleka) and I were not going to let that stop us from having a bit of fun...

Today, let's take a few minutes to discuss why it's hard to actually put guns into production. Making a functional prototype is one thing, but the truly hard part is often translating that one prototype into a whole set of tooling and fixtures to mass-produce the design. Generally speaking, the w...

Today I'm at the Cody Firearms Museum, taking a look at two of the guns that were used in the court case between Francis Bannerman and the Winchester company - a prototype Magot pump-action rifle and a Winchester-made example of a Krutzsch patent pump-action rifle.

The case came to be because ...

I am excited to have a chance today to take a trip to the range with a proper, factory L85A1 rifle (it's in the United States as a post-1986 dealer sample). I had a chance a while back to shoot one of these in the U.K., but I only had 10 cartridges to work with at that time. Today, I have several...