The ZK-391 is one in a series of Czech developmental semiautomatic rifles designed by Josef Koucký. It was developed initially in 1939 (hence the "39" in the designation), and was tested by the Italian military in 1943. It was ultimately not put into production, but nonetheless is an interesting ...

With the advent of the tank in World War One, antitank rifles became a priority for many countries, to provide infantry with some weapon to counter the new armored threat. The best known example of these (and the only one to see significant production before the end of WWI) was the German Tankgew...

In my recent video on the Whitworth rifle, I made a rather embarrassing mistake, interpreting "figure of merit" accuracy measurements as complete group sizes. This was incorrect, and caused me to seriously overestimate the accuracy of the Whitworth. It was indeed a outstandingly accurate rifle, b...

The wheel lock was one of the first types of early gun or firearm, developed as an alternative to the simple but problematic matchlock musket. The wheellock uses an iron pyrite set against a spinning serrated wheel to produce sparks to fire a charge of black powder. The wheel lock was complex and...

Following up yesterday's look at the history and mechanics of the Webley-Fosbery self-cocking revolvers, today we are out at the range to do some shooting with one.

In terms of handling, it is a comfortable gun to shoot, albeit with some exaggerated recoil because of the very high bore axis r...

George Fosbery, V.C., was a decorated British officer with substantial combat experience in India when he decided to design a better sidearm in 1895. True semiautomatic handguns were in their very early stages of development at that time, and Fosbery thought that one could have a more durable, mo...

Following up on yesterday's history and disassembly of the Webley 1913, today I am taking one of them out to the range. Courtesy of Mike Carrick from Arms Heritage magazine, I am shooting original WWI British .455 SL ammunition. We don't have a lot of it to work with here, but we will try out som...

William Whiting and the Webley company had high hopes for their self-loading pistols being adopted by the British military - but they never got the success they were hoping for.

After the poor performance of the Webley 1904 at trials, William Whiting decided to make sure his next attempt woul...

In the early years of the 20th century, before the Great War tempered society's interest in the martial arts, dueling came into the popular vogue. Not the lethal kind, but rather a more sporting style using pistols firing wax balls instead of lead bullets. It was even demonstrated at the 1908 Oly...

The Walther WA-2000 has a reputation of being the ultimate German sniper rifle, with no expense spared in its design and construction. Designed in the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, the WA2000 was intended to be a police sniper rifle, not a military arm. It is a bullpup layout an...

The Vickers-Berthier MkIII was adopted by the Indian army in 1933, and served through World War Two and into the 1970s (at least). It is chambered for the standard .303 British cartridge, fires from an open bolt, and uses top-mounted 30-round magazines. I didn't know exactly what to expect when I...

The Vickers-Berthier was initially designed by Andre Berthier in France prior to World War One. It went through a number of substantial design changes before the war, and was actually ordered in quantity by the United States right at the end of WWI - but the order was cancelled with the armistice...

The iconic weapon of the Rhodesian Bush War is the FN-FAL, painted in a distinctive "baby poop" yellow and green pattern. Because Rhodesia was under international embargo, its options for obtaining weapons were limited. Some domestic production was undertaken, but one large source was neighboring...

Today it's time to take the Norinco QBZ-97 - aka Type 97 NSR - out to the range for some shooting! This is the Canadian semiautomatic-only legal version of China's new military rifle, and it is chambered for the 5.56mm NATO cartridge (the Chinese military models use their 5.8x42mm cartridge).

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The Chinese military introduced a new 5.8x42mm cartridge in 1987, and then developed a new bullpup rifle to use it. The rifle was the QBZ Type 95, and it was a bullpup rifle with a rotating bolt and short-stroke gas piston operating system. Shortly thereafter, a commercial export version was rele...

In 1928, the Italian army adopted a rifle-mounted grenade launcher. It was a potentially interesting weapon which wound up being fatally handicapped by the use of ineffective grenades. The basic idea was to mount a second rifle receiver to the side of a Model 91TS carbine, but with an integral gr...

The Timberwolf is a bolt action precision rifle made by Prarie Gun Works of Manitoba, Canada. It was initially made as a commercial rifle in a number of different calibers, and in 2001 it won Canadian trials to become the C14 Timberwolf Medium Range Sniper Weapon System (replacing the C3A1 Parker...

The Colt 1902 Philippine Model revolver is a modified version of the Colt 1878 Double Action Army or Frontier model pistol. This was Colt’s first entry into the large-frame double action revolver market, following just after the 1877 small frame Lightning and Thunderer designs. It was a marginall...

The Lee-Speed rifle we looked at yesterday came with a set of really neat sight protectors, which I think are worth a separate video on their own. Quite a lot of work went into these, for something as simple as a sight protector!

This revolver, designed by Fordyce Beals (how cool of a name is that?), was developed while Colt’s patent on using the hammer to index the cylinder was still in effect. To avoid that patent, this Beals design uses the trigger to rotate and index the cylinder, with the hammer being cocked separate...

At the Fall 2021 meeting of the American Society of Arms Collectors, I had the opportunity to make a presentation on the development of French military repeating rifles. The story begins with the Mle 1874 Gras, and proceeds through three different patterns of tube-magazine Kropatschek type rifles...

The Alofs conversion is a contraption that can be bolted onto the side of a single shot break action shotgun to convert it into a 4+1 capacity repeating action. Patented by Herman Alofs in 1924 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US1507881), it was sold in the mid/late 1920s for $6. Surviving adve...

In the mid 1980s, an Italian designer named Alphonso Giambelli developed a bullpup pistol-caliber carbine with hopes of selling it to Italian law enforcement. That never happened, but the gun was offered on the commercial civil market as the semiauto AGM-1 by a company named Algimech (after ALpho...

Thanks to Jeff Folloder and Airtronics USA, I have a chance today to look at and test-fire a PSRL (Precision Shoulder-fired Rocket Launcher) - in essence, an American-made RPG-7. The rocket we are using here is a Bulgarian-made training round with an inert warhead and live booster and rocket.