Forgotten Weapons

Forgotten Weapons

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Forgotten Weapons
  • Japanese Contract Steyr-Solothurn S1-100 (aka MP34)

    In order to circumvent Versailles Treaty restrictions on arms manufacture, the German Rheinmetall firm purchased a small Swiss company called Solothurn Waffenfabrik in 1929, allowing it to route its business through Switzerland instead of Germany. One of its first products was the S1-100 submachi...

  • SC Robinson Confederate Sharps Carbine

    During the Civil War, the Confederacy was perpetually in serious need of armaments, as the South did not have the amount of industrial infrastructure that the North did. This led to many attempts at arms production by various entrepreneurs, of quite varied result. One of the more successful enter...

  • Parallel-Bore Side by Side Shotgun - Look Ma, No Rib!

    Virtually all side by side shotguns are not actually made with the barrels parallel - they are made pointing just slightly together, so that the shot patterns will converge and meet up at a particular range. Today, we have an Ellis Brothers (of Birmingham) sporting shotgun that was actually made ...

  • Argentina's Open-Bolt Pocket .22s: the Hafdasa HA and the Zonda

    Originally made by Hafdasa (Hispano-Argentina Fábrica de Automóviles S.A.), the HA pistol is a .22 Long Rifle caliber, semiauto only, open bolt pocket pistol. It was produced in the 1950s, right at the end of Hafdasa's existence (coincidence?). When the firm shut its doors, a group of employees t...

  • Zip 22: Shooting the Worst Gun Ever

    Today, may the good lord help me, I am taking the Zip 22 out to the range for some shooting.

    Note that while it actually worked remarkably well right up until it jammed solid, on the second range trip when we went back to get the high-speed footage, we literally could not get two rounds in a r...

  • USFA Zip 22: How a Garbage Gun Destroyed A Good Company

    USFA used to be the producers of probably the best Single Action Army reproductions on the market - but then the company owner decided to pursue a crazy whim and embarked on the Zip 22 project. This was to be a very modular and very inexpensive little pistol with lots of cool possibilities. Probl...

  • Dutch Farmers Against the Empire: ZAR Mausers of the Boer War

    When the intercepted Jameson Raid made it clear to the governments of the ZAR (Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek; South African Republic) and the Orange Free State that war with Britain was imminent, a hasty armaments program was undertaken by both countries. The ZAR went looking for small arms, and wo...

  • Shooting the Yugoslav M49/57 Submachine Gun

    The Yugoslav M49/57 submachine gun looks very similar to the Soviet PPSh-41, but it constructed quite differently, and has a much larger recoil spring. The question is, how will it shoot? Will it be fast and controllable like the Papasha or slower like the Sudayev?

    Thanks to Marstar for lettin...

  • Yugoslavia's PPSh Lookalike: The M49/57

    Shortly after the end of World War Two, Yugoslavia adopted a submachine gun that looked very much like the Soviet PPSh-41, and was obviously inspired by it. However, the manufacturing methods were completely different, with the Yugoslav gun being of all milled construction and with internal parts...

  • Forgotten Weapons Short: Yataghan Bayonets

    What is the explanation for the odd recurved Yataghan-style bayonet popular through the second half of the 19th century? It may have been named after a Turkish sword, but it doesn't really match that pattern of blade. It isn't any stronger that a straight or single-curved blade, and its balance m...

  • HK XM-8: What Was it and Why? (With Larry Vickers)

    Larry Vickers has the closest thing most any of us will ever have to a true XM-8 rifle, and has more than a little trigger time on the original XM-8 rifles. So, I asked him to explain what the rifle was and why it failed to become the new American service rifle. It's a fascinating story that will...

  • Shooting the Full Auto XM-8 Carbine

    Thanks to H&K and to Trijicon for range access, we are out today shooting an original and authentic XM-8 carbine! The XM-8 family are relatively bulky guns; moreso than one would expect from seeing photos of them. However, they are also very smooth and comfortable guns to shoot, with a relatively...

  • Almost Adopted: The H&K XM-8 Family

    Today we are in H&K's Grey Room in Virginia, taking a look at the XM-8 program. The rifle evolved form the kinetic energy carbine portion of the doomed XM29/OICW program, and eventually became the G36 rifle. In between those two, however, it was the XM-8, and it came close to adoption by the US m...

  • Winchester 1964 SPIW: Flechettes and a Blow-Forward Grenade Launcher

    Today we are looking at the Winchester company's entry into the 1964 SPIW (Special Purpose Infantry Weapon) trials. The SPIW program was an attempt to increase small arms lethality by increasing hit probability with ideas like hyper-velocity flechette cartridges and burst fire trigger mechanisms....

  • Interview: Mathieu Willemsen, Curator of the Dutch National Military Museum

    Today we have a brief conversation with Mathieu Willemsen, Curator of the Dutch National Military Museum. This was shorter than I would have preferred, because it came right at the end of a long day of filming guns, and we only had a few minutes - but I would like to encourage anyone who happens ...

  • Wildey Survivor .45 WinMag: Perfect for a Backup Gun Match

    Thanks to Peter, we have a .45 Winchester Magnum Wildey Survivor to do some video with. I figured the best way to start would be to take it to a Backup Gun match, right? Unfortunately, I had continuous feeding problems despite having (I thought) gotten the gas system properly dialed in. Despite t...

  • Who is Springfield Armory? A Tale of Two Entities

    Today we will take a look at the history of Springfield Armory - both the American national arsenal founded in the 1770s and the commercial entity founded in the 1970s.

  • Webley Model 1911 Stocked .22 Single-Shot Target Pistol

    The Webley Model 1911 is a single-shot, self-ejecting target pistol made only for a few years. It was fitted with a long barrel to increase sight radius and also a detachable shoulder stock for those who wanted a bit more stability when shooting. Mechanically, the piece must be loaded manually, a...

  • Walther Toggle-Locked Semiauto Shotgun (ouch!)

    Between the world wars, the Walther company designed and marketed a short recoil, toggle-locked 12 gauge shotgun for sporting use. It was patented by the Walther brothers, but actually manufactured by the Deutsche-Werke consortium, which was organized by the German government to employ German wor...

  • Walther Olympia: Germany's Interwar Target Pistol

    The Colt Woodsman, introduced in 1915, was the premier - and really the only serious - option for the competitive target shooter into the 1920s when the Walther company decided to introduce a competitor. Walther needed a product to bring business, of course, and the Versailles treaty prohibited i...

  • Walther's .45ACP MP (P38 Precursor)

    During the process of developing the pistol which would become the German army's P38, the Walther company was also interested in potential export contracts (like the one they actually did get from Sweden). One potential contract briefly explored was to the United States, and a few prototype MP pi...

  • H&K VP-70M: Polymer Framed Cutting Edge Machine Pistol from 1973

    The VP-70 was designed by Heckler & Koch cofounder Alex Seidel, and introduced in 1973. It was made with the idea of being a gun easily mass produced for arming a civilian resistance in case of Russian invasion of East Germany, but the West German government opted not to adopt it. In the original...

  • A Well-Traveled Luger

    This Luger has seen basically all of 20th century German history. It began as a 1917 production DWM pistol, used in World War One. After the war, it was one of the guns remarks for use by the police and military of the Weimar Republic, and at some point in this period had a special police safety ...

  • Swiss Prototype von Steiger Auto-Ejecting Revolvers

    In the 1870s, Switzerland was looking for a new military revolver, and they were particularly interested in finding a system which would allow faster reloading than the standard loading gate and manual ejection rod. A military veteran and gunsmith by the name of von Steiger in Thun submitted a de...