The Winchester 1866 was chambered for the .44 Henry rimfire cartridge, like the Henry rifle before it. Before too long, however, centerfire ammunition began to take over as the best and most common type of cartridge. The Model 1866 continued to sell for decades, but some buyers wanted to use cent...

The 1883 Colt-Burgess was the Colt company's single, brief endeavor to enter the lever action "cowboy" rifle market. Winchester had been making some moves to break into Colt's lucrative shotgun and pistol markets, and Colt reacted by hiring noted gun designer Andrew Burgess to design them a rifle...

Ethan Allen was a very prolific gun manufacturer in the US, being involved with a series of different companies. This particular rifle of his appealed to me because it is an excellent example of how many different clever elements can be in something as simple and pedestrian as a single shot rifle...

The Ball Repeating Carbine was one of the last Civil War arms manufactured, as an initial order of 1,002 units was ordered in 1864 but not delivered until shortly after the cessation of hostilities in 1865. The carbine was designed by Albert Ball of Worcester, Massachusetts and manufactured by La...

Today we're looking at an Evans repeating rifle. These were manufactured in Maine between 1873 and 1879, in three distinct models (I did goof in the video and called this particular one a transitional model, when it's actually a new model). The way to distinguish the variants is:

Old Model: No...

The Spencer repeating rifle was a major leap forward in infantry firepower, and more than one hundred thousand of them were purchased by the US military during the Civil War. The Spencer offered a 7-round magazine of rimfire .56 caliber cartridges in an era when the single-shot muzzleloading rifl...

The Bullard company was one of the lesser-known firearm manufacturers during the late 1800s, producing both single-shot falling block and lever-action repeating rifles. This particular example is a .45 caliber large-frame sporter. It was originally a very fancy, high end version of the gun, and s...

During the Civil War, the Confederacy was perpetually in serious need of armaments, as the South did not have the amount of industrial infrastructure that the North did. This led to many attempts at arms production by various entrepreneurs, of quite varied result. One of the more successful enter...

Designed by brothers Charles and Sebre Howard and first patented in 1862, this is a single shot lever action produced by the Whitneyville Armory between 1866 and 1870. It is a really neat compact design that is all contained within a tube. The system was made in rifle, sporting rifle, and shotgun...

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...

In 1962, Remington tried to exploit the popularity of pop-culture cowboys by introducing a lever-action version of its of its Nylon 66 semiauto .22 rifle. This new model was the Nylon 76, named the "Trial Rider". It used the same faux-wood styled polymer frame as the Nylon 66, and was actually a ...