Bent Agner Nielsen was a Danish tinkerer born in 1925, who studied art as a young man and worked as a painter. In the 1970s he became interested in firearms, beginning with engraving work. This soon evolved into an interest in mechanical design, and in 1978 he began work on the M80, an Olympic-st...

This is a rifle I have not been able to find any specific documentation about or even reference to - but we can tell what it it, and that's a very interesting story. The rifle is mechanically a Schlegelmilch design, from Louis Schlegelmilch of the Spandau Arsenal in Germany. An earlier 1896 patte...

As practice for Finnish Brutality, I ran a 2-Gun match with the Finnish M39 Mosin Nagant I am planning to use over in Finland. The M39 is the final iteration of the Mosin in Finnish service, and has very good sights, a great trigger, and a nice smooth action (for a Mosin, anyway). I was using PPU...

Finland adopted the AK in 7.62x39mm after World War Two, and continues to use the AK to this day. The standard pattern RK62 was starting to fall a bit short, and so in the late 1980s a program was begun at Valmet to produce a modernized version for the Finnish Defense Forces. Valmet was acquired ...

Britain began the process of replacing its Vickers aircraft machine guns with a new Colt/Browning design in 1935, with its adoption of the Colt MG40. This was essentially John Browning's air cooled M1919 machine gun made smaller and lighter, with an increased rate of fire, and reversible feed dir...

The Beretta Model 38A was one of the very best submachine guns of World War Two. Designed by veteran Beretta engineer Tullio Marengoni (who designed most of Beretta’s pistols as well as the Beretta M1918 SMG and 1918/30 carbine), it was the first Italian weapon to use a cartridge equivalent to 9x...

The "Korsu" is a special version of the Suomi made for use in the bunkers of the Mannerheim Line. When construction on the Line really kicked into high gear in the summer of 1939, is was discovered that the vision slits in the bunkers were too small to fit the muzzle of a standard m/31 Suomi. In ...

In August 1903, Thomas Bennett (head of the Winchester company) wrote a letter to his many distributors and agents explaining how Winchester had decided to part ways with the Browning Brothers, and how the company would certainly be better off as a result. The gun at the heart of the breakup was ...

There are a fairly wide variety of silenced Sten guns that were made during World War Two, because many were needed for small Special Operations Executive missions. However, the British Army did also formally develop and adopt such a weapon. It was initially requested in 1942, with the first tria...

Zastava has been making AK rifles in Serbia (formerly Yugoslavia) since the 1960s, and today has a number of offerings made for the commercial market. One of the recent ones is the M90 (or more specifically, the PAPM90PS). This is a 5.56mm rifle fundamentally based on the M70 pattern. It uses Ser...

In light of the approaching Finnish Brutality: The Winter War match, I though we could take a look at the two rifles associated with the world's most successful sniper: Simo Häyhä. Häyhä was born in 1905, joined the Civil Guard at the age of 17, and did his mandatory military service from 1925 to...

Today we have a rifle from a really neat forgotten corner of American military history. During World War One, the Pacific Northwest was the source of prime lumber, in particular Sitka Spruce that was ideal for aircraft production. The US military wanted that spruce for its own aircraft, and there...

The FNC (Fabrique Nationale Carabine) was FN’s followup to the unsuccessful CAL rifle. Chambered for the newly-adopted 5.56mm NATO cartridge, the FNC uses a long stroke gas piston system very reminiscent of the AK, combined with a stamped upper and milled aluminum lower. After about 5 years of de...

The Vickers "K" Class gun - also known as the Vickers Gas Operated - was the gun the Vickers company thought would replace the heavy water-cooled Vickers and allow them to remain primary machine gun supplier to the British army. The design actually came from the French designer Berthier, who has ...

The Dutch military started looking for semiauto pistols to replace its aging revolvers around 1899. They tested all the early models; the Roth, Borchardt, Mauser and Mannlicher - and then they obtained a Borchardt-Luger (aka, a Parabellum, or Luger). They first tested a long-barreled model with s...

In the 1930s, Portugal was looking to update its small arms, and wanted to get some top-shelf K98k Mausers to replace its 1904 Mauser-Vergueiros. The country was on good terms with Germany, and so Portugal placed an order for 100,000 K98k rifles in 7.92mm Mauser caliber from Mauser Oberndorf in 1...

At the end of the Great War, the United States sent several thousand soldiers to eastern Siberia, to protect war supplies from the Red Russian forces and to help rescue the Czechoslovak Legion. Also known as the Polar Bear Expedition, this force spent 1919 around Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok. They...

In 1907, the British adopted the final major pattern in the evolution of the Short, Magazine, Lee Enfield. Designated the ShtLE MkIII (Short Lee Enfield) at the time, it would be retroactively renamed Rifle No1 MkIII in the 1920s. This new design was simpler and more durable than its predecessors...

The modularity and clever design of the Stemple Takedown Gun is perhaps best illustrated by the STG-M1A and STG-1928 (these are the same gun with either a horizontal or vertical front grip). In the early 2000s a bunch of Thompson parts kits came into the US, WW2 vintage lend-lease guns sent to Ru...

One of the scarce, small-production manufacturers of the Luger is Krieghoff - Heinrich Krieghoff to be exact. Kreighoff Waffenfabrik was a smallish arms company that wanted to get into major contracts with the rearming German military in the 1930s. They began by bidding on a contract for 10,000 L...

The Lahti L-35 pistol was adopted by the Finnish military with the intention of it replacing the Luger, although production was never great enough to accomplish that goal. Early in its production, a couple of special target models were made for field shooting use, and this is one of them (serial ...

One of the best-looking versions of the Stemple is, I believe, the STG-34k. This was the result of BRP obtaining a whole bunch of MG-34 parts kits as part of a separate project to make an MG-34-style upper for the AR platform, and thus having all the grip models leftover. Well, why not fit the...

Uruguay first adopted a Mauser rifle in the 1880s, with the single-shot Mauser model 1871. After an abortive attempt to update those rifles to a small bore smokeless powder cartridge (the Dovitiis conversion), they opted to purchase Mauser 95s from DWM in the new (and excellent) 7x57mm Mauser car...

When the MP-18 was issued by the German Army in World War One, it used the then-in-production Luger "snail drum" magazines. These were expensive, awkward, and generally not ideal. Once the war ended, Hugo Schmeisser quickly developed an alternative box magazine design. The initial goal was simply...