The FN MAG was adopted by the United States military to replace its aging inventory of M60 machine guns. It was designated the M240 in US parlance, and first used as a vehicle-mounted machine gun. Subsequently both the US Army and US Marine Corps adopted ground mount versions for infantry use; th...

After the problems with the Colt XM-148 under barrel grenade launcher were discovered in service in Vietnam, the US military was eager to quickly find a better alternative. The idea of replacing the standalone M79 grenade launcher with an under barrel unit was very appealing, and the development ...

Eugene Golubtsov - aka Lugerman - has been building beautiful .45 ACP Lugers base don the original DWM technical data package for the 1907 trial Luger for a little while now. We previously looked at one of his standard guns, and today I have a chance to do some shooting with the long-barrel targe...

George Lanchester was the engineer responsible for originally reverse engineering the German MP28 submachine gun for production by the British, under the designation Lanchester. Once he finished that design work, the gun was put into production by the Sterling Engineering Company, and Lanchester ...

After the British adoption of the Accuracy International PM as the L96A1 sniper rifle, other nations began to give a very serious look at the company and its rifles. One of the first was Sweden, which requested a rifle like the PM/L96 but with a few changes to better suit the northern environment...

In 2007, the British Army placed an order for 582 AI Arctic Warfare Super Magnum rifles chambered for the .338 Lapua Magnum cartridge, formally adopting the model as the L115A3 sniper rifle. This followed special forces use of the .338 Accuracy International rifles in Afghanistan, where the A1 (f...

The Accuracy International Precision Marksman rifle was the winner of the British MoD's competition to replace the L42A1 as the standard British sniper rifle, and was accordingly adopted as the L96A1. It was the vanguard of the modern sniper rifle, with a highly modular chassis design, and it rev...

The Sd.Kfz. 2 Kettenkraftrad (aka Kettenrad) is a deliciously German sort of vehicle, a small utility tractor made with a pair of treads and motorcycle front wheel. It was powered by a 4 cylinder Opel automotive engine generating 36 horsepower, and had a 3-speed gearbox with high and low range tr...

There are thousands of machine guns currently in the National Firearms Act registry registered to people born before 1900. Think about that for a moment - every one of those owners is deceased, and those machine guns are still out there somewhere.

Periodically, the family of a deceased vetera...

When I film at the Morphy Company, I always enjoy taking time to chat with Master Sergeant (retired) John Keene, who is their NFA expert. He always has some very interesting insights into the state and trends of the machine gun collecting community. This time, I figured I would share some of that...

I wrote this paper back in 2003 or 2004 for a college class I was taking (HIST 595 - The Holocaust And Genocide). Today, it sounds a bit amateurish - but I suppose that is to be expected of something written by someone barely out of their teens. I think it could be much better written today, and ...

One of the questions I got for this month's Q&A was, "what are your favorite submachine guns?" Well, I figured that would be a good idea for a standalone video instead of just a Q&A answer, so here we are! My top SMGs are:

5: vz61 Skorpion (honorable mention; more PDW than SMG)
4: M/31 Suomi
...

During World War One, Joseph Alphonse Huot, a Canadian machinist and blacksmith living in Quebec, designed a conversion of the Ross MkIII rifle to become an automatic rifle. The Ross was the standard issue Canadian rifle at the beginning of the war, and Huopt wanted to find a way to economically ...

We have just seen the news that Hudson Manufacturing has filed for bankruptcy - and the HMG Sturmgewehr rifles are also still nowhere to be seen. What's the deal?

Lever-delayed blowback is a relatively uncommon action system, although it is applicable to a wide variety fo firearms and has been successfully used in submachine guns, rifles, and light machine guns. It uses a principle of mechanical disadvantage on a fulcrum lever to force a mass to accelerate...

Gas-delayed blowback is a relatively uncommon operating system used in handguns. It is not an efficient mechanism for high-pressure rifle power cartridges, but works well with something like 9mm Parabellum. It tends to provide benefits of light felt recoil and better-than-average accuracy, in exc...

The short stroke gas piston operating system is common on modern rifles. It is defined as a gas piston which travels less than the distance of the bolt carrier (and is thus by definition not connected to the bolt carrier). This is in contrast to the long-stroke gas piston, which travels the full ...

What is the difference between patents and copyrights? If someone wants to reproduce an old firearm design, how do they get the rights to? Why can't you reproduce a gun design from patent drawings? What information is in a technical data package? This and more, today on How Does It Work!

To properly understand how firearms work, one must first recognize the difference between two fundamental mechanical systems in them. One is the locking system, and the other is the operating system. The locking system is what keeps the breech end of the gun sealed when firing (examples include t...

The long stroke gas piston system was in its heyday about 50 years ago, and was popular in both rifles and machine guns. The principle is that the gas piston is fixed to the bolt carrier, and both cycle rearward for the full length of the cartridge upon firing. The system was used in such disting...

Long recoil operation is one of the most mechanically interesting of the main firearm operating systems. When the gun fires, the recoil energy generated forces the barrel to move rearward, and the bolt remains locked into the barrel until the two reach the full length of travel (the length of the...

Direct gas impingement is an operating system that has been used only in a few production guns (all of them rifles). It is extremely simple, although perhaps not well suited to adjustability. It is also not the operating system of the AR series of rifles - we will cover those in a separate video ...

The blow forward system has only bee used on three commercially-produced firearms: the Schwarzlose 1908, Hino-Komuro, and Mannlicher 1894 (The SIG AK-53 uses a forward barrel movement, but in conjunction with a locked breech). It offers a simple system with a theoretical extra margin of safety be...

Eugene Stoner's AR-10 and AR-15 use an operating mechanism that is often called "gas impingement," but which is actually a cleverly structured gas piston located within the bolt carrier. Gas is tapped form the barrel and moved all the way back to just behind the chamber, where it enters the bolt ...