A bit of shooting with an MP40 at an indoor range, courtesy of Hill & Mac Gunworks.

Today were are going to do something a bit different than normal, and take a detailed look at an intersection of arms and art: gold damascene. This is a type of art used to embellish a wide variety of objects, including firearms.

Gold damascene enjoyed a renaissance in Spain in the mid 1850s t...

This rifle design was developed by the Gevelot cartridge company to compete with the Modele 1866 Chassepot for French military use, although it was not successful in that attempt. The weapon has an uncommon sliding chamber mechanism in which the cartridge does not move forward into the chamber, b...

Robert Simpson's massive project of studying and documenting German training rifles has resulted in this much-anticipated reference tome. At 700 pages and full color, it a tremendous resource for understanding the chronology and features of the dozens if not hundreds of variations of these rifles...

We have lots of exciting content coming for you in 2017, including at least two international trips, thanks to support from the fine folks on Patreon! I will be visiting the Pattern Room collection, and also making an exploratory trip to France. I don't know what material that will result in righ...

Today's question topics::

0:00:24 - Belt-fed ARs
0:02:13 - US Army and the .276 vs 7.62 NATO
0:06:20 - Finnish cartridge choices
0:08:11 - Guns with built-in recoil absorbing mechanisms
0:10:45 - Deep dive on Krnka pistols
0:11:37 - Surviving Vampir night sight?
0:12:35 - Can countries e...

The French military during World War One used a number of American-made small arms, including both the Winchester Self-Loader and the Winchester Model 1894. A total of 15,100 Model 94s were purchased by France in 1913 and 1914, and they were used as a supplemental arm for drivers and airfield gua...

Today we are going through the French rifle ammunition used in the Lebel, Berthier, and MAS series rifles - 8mm Lebel and 7.5mm French.

The 8mm Lebel cartridge began as simply a necked-down version of the 11mm Gras cartridge, because that cartridge was already in use in the French Navy Kropats...

George Fosbery V.C. is best known in firearms circles for the Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver, but he experimented with several other firearms designs as well. This particular one never made it into commercial production, but it uses a bolt design very reminiscent of what Johnson and Stoner wou...

George Fosbery was the British officer (Major, at the time of this particular design) responsible for the quite famous Webley-Fosbery self-cocking revolver, as well as the Paradox system for shotgun slugs and many other lesser known firearms inventions. This rifle was his entry into British trial...

A montage of a bunch of shooting from our trip to Finland in June 2017! Including:

m/31 Suomi
KP-44
KvKK-62
LS-26
DP-28 (Emma)
M91/24, M27, and M28/30 Mosins
M32/33 Maxim
Rk-95
Sako TRG in 7.62mm NATO

Thanks to Varusteleka.com for arranging this shooting trip!

Final prices from the last RIA regional auction (June 2017).

Apparently, a lot of people really preferred the expended discussion of auction prices that I did with the recent James Julia auction, so I did the same for the recent Rock Island auction. This one had a bunch of submachine guns (both transferrables and dealer samples), so we will take a look at ...

The Farquhar-Hill was a semiauto rifle developed in Britain prior to World War 1. It was the idea of Birmingham gunsmith Arthur Hill, and financed by Aberdeen industrialist Mowbray Farquhar. The design began as a long-recoil system, but that was replaced with a unique spring-buffered gas operated...

Today I am joined by Forgotten Weapons Field Research Assistant Clay to test out one of those super-extended 90-round AK mags that are so often seen at the junk tables of gun shows. How bad are they? Or do they actually work? Let's find out...

Thanks to Marstar for letting me use their RPK to ...

I had 10 rounds of .280 British ammunition to work with today, so I opted for several rounds in semiauto (including some slow motion shots) and then one burst at the end. The .280 cartridge is less powerful than the 7.62mm NATO, but in my opinion the EM-2 remains a rifle much better used in semia...

The EM-2 was the rifle that the British pushed for NATO trials in 1950. It was a rifle well ahead of its time in several areas - as a select-fire bullpup rifle, it was intended to replace both the infantry rifle and the submachine gun. Its .280 caliber cartridge was designed with combat ranges of...

The EM-1 was one of the British post-WWII rifle development projects with the ambitious goal of replacing both the infantry rifle and the submachine gun with a single select-fire weapon optimized for combat within 600 meters (as opposed to the prior doctrine of 1000m effective ranges). The design...

The Korsac EM-1 (not to be confused with the Thorpe EM-1, which is a completely different rifle) was a bullpup light machine gun based on captured examples of the German FG-42 patatroop rifle. It was developed between 1945 and 1947 by a team led by Polish refugee designer named Korsac.

It was ...

Snabb was a Swedish company created to market a system for converting bolt action rifles into semiautomatic rifles. The system was patented in the US in 1938, making this one of the very last attempts at such a conversion. It appears that the company made a substantial number of overtures to many...

Manufactured by Rheinmetall and designed by Louis Stange, this light .32ACP (7.65mm Browning) carbine is a bit of a mysterious item. Very little written information exists about it, but we know it was sold on the commercial market as it appears in several firearms sale catalogs and it is, frankly...

I have had a parts kit for a Soviet DPM light machine gun (actually a Polish one, but the design is identical) stashed away for many years now, with the hope to eventually have it built into a live gun. When I found out that SMG (maker the the sweet semiauto FG42 replicas) was making a new produc...

The DeLisle carbine was a conversion of a standard SMLE rifle to the .45 ACP cartridge, feeding from modified 1911 pistol magazines. It was fitted with a 7" (175mm) barrel and a very large integral suppressor. The combination of the subsonic cartridge, the large suppressor volume, and even a soun...

Every time I say "carbine" on film, I get a bunch of people complaining that I'm saying it wrong. So...am I?