In the aftermath of World War One, the Japanese military saw the utility of infantry-portable light grenade launchers instead of rifle grenades, and adopted the Type 10 in 1921 (Taisho 10). It went into production in 1923 at the Tokyo Army Arsenal, although the great Tokyo earthquake led to produ...

The SIG company of Neuhausen Switzerland spent the 1920s, 30s, and 40s working on developmental semiauto rifles to sell both to the Swiss military and abroad. One of the experimental models in the succession of designs was the Model U, of which 16 were made in caliber 7.5x55mm Swiss. It was a gas...

So, you would like to get an original AR-10 rifle to shoot? Well, the original Armalite AR10 rifles were almost all manufactured by Artillerie-Inrichtingen in the Netherlands, and they were virtually all machine guns. They were made circa 1960-1961, and only a few contracts were made -Cuba, Guate...

In the world of converted semiautomatic “machine guns,” the Browning 1919 is a happy example of one of the most iconic and historically important US machine guns and also one of the cheapest semiautomatic belt fed guns available. This stems from two factors, primarily. One is that the Browning 19...

Josef Schulhof was an Austrian who decided to leave his farm and work in firearms design. He moved to Vienna and received his first firearms patent in 1882. He would go on to design and manufacture a small line of manual repeating handguns through the mid and late 1880s, until his death in 1890. ...

The Remington Rolling Block was one of the most widely successful and popular military rifles of the late 1800s, and its development began with the Remington Split Breech carbine during the American Civil War. The concept was independently conceived by two different engineers - one was Leonard Ge...

William Pritchard was a Birmingham gunsmith in the mid 1800s who offered both firearms and air guns, and this particular ball-reservoir air gun is a fine example of the latter. Air guns have existed in Europe nearly as long as firearms, although they have never had the popularity of their powder-...

The OSS experimented with a lot of…unorthodox weapons during World War Two, and one of their overarching goals was a weapon with a 100 yard lethal range but without flash or noise. To this end they experimented with a number of suppressed firearms as well as weird stuff like various crossbow desi...

William McCarty patented this turret revolver design in 1909 (submitted in 1908, approved in 1909), with the idea of making a high capacity revolver. His gun held 18 rounds of .22 rimfire ammunition - double the typical .22 revolver capacity. He did that by making a vertical turret system with a ...

Korth is a boutique firearms manufacturer in Germany generally known for their very fine and very expensive revolvers. In 2015, they decided to introduce an automatic pistol as well, which they called the PRS. It is a combination of a 1911 frame and a roller-delayed, fixed barrel slide assembly. ...

The J. Kimball Arms Company of Detroit introduced a semiauto pistol in 1955, chambered for the .30 Carbine cartridge - what better companion for the tactical uber weapon of the day, the M1 Carbine? Kimball’s pistol was styled heavily after the High Standard, and it looks good and handles well. Th...

The Jenks carbine was a remarkably svelte and elegant breechloading system patented by South Carolinian William Jenks in 1838. It was tested by the US Navy in 1841, and found to be quite successful. The Navy would proceed to adopt it, and order 1,000 rifles and 5,250 carbines from N.P. Ames in th...

The H&K SR9 was a the version of the H&K G3/91 designed to comply with (or avoid, if you prefer) the Bush Sr. 1989 import ban on “assault weapons”. About 4,000 of these were imported between 1990 and 1998, and they featured a bare muzzle and plastic thumbhole stock and handguard. The first 1000 o...

Patented by one John Hall of Cumberland, England in 1902, this is a device intended to scare birds out of a field at regular intervals. It has twelve chambers for 12-gauge pinfire shotgun shells, which are fired by falling steel weights. Those weights are held up by thin cotton strings which are ...

When the Browning Arms Company first began importing semiautomatic FAL rifles from FN in 1959, the submitted an example for evaluation, and ATF determined that it was not a machine gun. The rifle was made with a selector that could not be moved to the fully automatic position, and did not have th...

Production of the Colt Pocket Hammerless (aka the Model M) pretty much died at the end of World War Two. Military contracts ended, and the civilian market was quite weak - Colt shipped just 132 of the .32 caliber guns between 1946 and 1953, and only a handful of .380s at the same time. Several pr...

In the early 1970s, Colt wanted to develop a new military pistol so that it could offer a modern replacement for the venerable 1911. Colt Engineer Robert Roy designed the new gun in 1971, and was granted patents on it in 1972. It was made entirely of stainless steel, had a 15 round capacity (in 9...

In 1994, a man named Mark Westrom, owner of Eagle Arms, purchased the husk of the Armalite corporation, and acquired its trademarks. Westrom wanted to create a new commercial .308 AR pattern rifle, and did so under the Armalite AR-10 name. He developed an AR-10 which borrowed some elements from t...

The Swiss replaced their Vetterli rifles in the late 1880s with the new Schmidt-Rubin pattern, and this eventually trickled down to the cadet corps. These youth programs had been using short single-shot 1870 Vetterli carbines, but as those became obsolete and in need of replacement, the 1897 Kade...

The Reibel Modele M31 was the variation of the French Chatellerault M24/29 light machine gun made for use in vehicles and fortifications. In accordance with that role, it lacked a buttstock or sights (these were integrated into the vehicle or fortress mounts), was fitted with a very heavy barrel ...

When South Africa decided to replace the R1 rifle (a metric FAL), they chose to adopt the Israeli Galil. Both nations had similar environmental issues with blowing sand (in northwestern South Africa particularly), and Israel was one of the few nations willing to trade arms with South Africa in th...

Today we are looking at - and shooting - a one of a kind .22 rimfire conversion kit for the Galil developed by South African designer Tony Neophytou (better known for the Neostead shotgun, Neopup grenade launcher, and NTW-20 anti-material rifle). The idea here is to convert a standard R4 Galil se...

I think this is the longest Q&A to date...and as usual, I had far more questions submitted by you awesome Patrons than I could answer, so if yours didn't get in this time please submit it again next time.

0:00:37 - The Stoner 63 and value of modular platforms
0:03:37 - Forgotten Weapons on In...

On to our questions...

0:50 - Berthier type iron sights on military rifles
2:15 - Books covering all US military small arms
3:25 - 4.85mm British compared to its contemporaries
4:19 - Alternative history: PMC armament in the 20s and 30s
8:19 - What gun do I dislike the most?
8:40 - How to...