The German military establishment during WWII has a reputation for innovation and excellence, which is pretty well deserved. But even they produced some real goose eggs, and the Gewehr 41 is one of them. That the G41 was even remotely successful is a tribute to the creativity of the Walther and M...

During the 1960s, the Colt company was looking to help market the M-16 rifle to military forces by pairing it with a light machine gun. They were going after the exact same market segment as the Stoner 63 system. The first attempt at this was the Colt CMG-1, which had some limited parts commonali...

Today we're looking at VIS Radom: A Study and Photographic Album of Poland's Finest Pistol, by William J. York. The Radom is not a as well known as other pistols of the era (like the 1911, Browning High-Power, or Walther P38), but is an excellent gun and has a devoted following. It is also one of...

It's a bit of a different book review today - since we've been looking at Swiss arms all week (and there's a really unique one coming up tomorrow), we needed to find a book on the Swiss. What we have is one of 9 or 10 volumes on Swiss military arms, both issued and experimental. This volume (the ...

A general look at a couple of early automatic pistol designs, and what they have in common. We have a Bergmann-Bayard M1910/21, a C96 "Broomhandle" Mauser, and an Astra M900.

The Tarn was a 9x19mm pistol developed by a Polish ex=pat designer named Z. de Lubicz Bakanowski. It was a simple blowback design, with a quite heavy slide and recoil spring. It was manufactured by the Swift Rifle Company, and ten examples were made as prototypes. They were tested formally by the...

Finnish Brutality 2021 is going to be a tough match in the best case. But I will be running it in a 1940 uniform, with a Mosin. A Finnish M39 Mosin, sure, but still a Mosin. That means that I have a lot of things already working against me, and the last thing I want is to have the rifle not shoot...

Today I am out at the range with a new M91 from Zastava USA. This is the civilian version of the Serbian M91 sniper’s rifle, which was developed in the 1990s to replace the M76 in Serbian Army service. The M76 was chambered for 8mm Mauser, while the M91 uses 7.62x54R. Aside from a 3-position adju...

After World War Two, Yugoslavia was left with a tremendous amount of German war material - enough that it cost to adopt the 8x57mm Mauser cartridge as its standard. The M76 precision rifle was developed for that cartridge, and saw substantial military use. By the 1980s, however, the decision was ...

In the 1970s, the Yugoslav Army decided that it wanted a semiautomatic marksman's rifle, something akin to the Romanian PSL or Soviet Dragunov. Not having the technical data package to manufacture the SVD, the Zastava factory set about scaling up its M70 Kalashnikov to meet this requirement. The ...

The NATO rifle trials of the early 1950s eventually chose the 7.62mm x 51mm cartridge, and the British and Belgians agreed on the FAL rifle to shoot it (and they thought the US would as well, but that's another story). The British government formally accepted the FAL for troop trials, and in 1954...

Germany, Britain, and France all introduced luminous night sights for their service rifles in 1916. Today we are looking at a Gewehr 98 and an SMLE that have detachable WW1 night sights fitted (and the SMLE also has a metal muzzle cover device).

This AK was purchased by someone I know, and it is so utterly awful that I just had to put it on camera. I’m obscured the name of the shop that did the build because I don’t know the circumstances, how long ago it was done, and if the builder still has any affiliation with the shop – and I don’t ...

I often see questions form people asking why drum magazines are not more widely used - the BAR and the MP40/I in particular. People often view the box vs drum magazine question simply in terms of capacity - where the drum is obviously superior. However, there are several other elements to the que...

I have had a number of people email me saying that they are interested in starting a gun collection, and what would I say they should collect? I think this is a fundamentally erroneous approach to the question. There used to be a sort of understanding that "Gun Collecting" meant a specific group ...

The WALAM 48 was a copy of the Walther Model PP made by Fegyver- és Gépgyártó Részvénytársaság (aka FÉG) in Hungary in the years after World War Two. It was originally produced as the 48M police pistol (in .32 caliber) to replace the aging stocks of Frommer Stop pistols used by Hungarian police. ...

Among the nations of the Warsaw Pact, only Czechoslovakia designed and produced its own infantry assault rifle - everyone else used the Kalashnikov. The Czech vz.58 is often mistaken for an AK because it has the same basic layout, but is in reality a completely different gun mechanically and has ...

A series of very compact submachine guns - possibly better described as personal defense weapons - was made in Britain at the end of World War Two under the name Viper (as an interesting aside, snake names were popular - the EM-1 and EM-2 were code-named Cobra and Mamba during the same timeframe)...

The Ulster Volunteer Force was a Loyalist organization dedicated to keeping Ireland in the United Kingdom, in reaction to the Home Rule bills being considered by the UK parliament. In 1914 they purchased nearly 25,000 surplus rifles and 3 million rounds of ammunition in Hamburg and arranged to ha...

I get a fair number of questions about restoring sporterized rifles, so I figured I should address them in a stand-alone video...

People tend to think of quick-detach slings as the stuff of nylon and fast-ex buckles, but these things have actually been around for a long time. One example is this Japanese Arisaka sling. Using two wire clips to attach to sling swivels, it is very quick and easy to detach from the rifle. We do...

What goes into preparing a gun for filming? Function checking, zeroing, and generally building some familiarity. Today we will go through that process with a Japanese Type 96 Nambu LMG. Rather like some French guns, Japanese small arms from World War Two have a thoroughly undeserved poor reputati...

If there is a historical military firearm out there as badly misunderstood as the Chauchat, it is probably the Type 94 Nambu pistol. Nambu designed this pistol with an exposed sear bar, which was not a great idea - but it was also nowhere near as bad of an idea as many people think today. In fact...