The KE-7 was the product of two Swiss designers, Pal Kiraly and Gotthard End, and was introduced in 1929 by the Swiss manufacturer SIG. It was a recoil operated design and fired from an open bolt. The guns were not adopted by the Swiss military, and were exported primarily to Latin America, Ethio...

Before the Winter War, the standard light machine gun adopted by the Finnish military was the Lahti-Saloranta LS-26. This was a complex and finely built weapon, using a short recoil action and tilting bolt, chambered for the same 7.62x54mm rimmed cartridge as used by Finland's Mosin-Nagant infant...

We have looked at a couple different Madsen light machine guns previously, but until today I have not had the chance to do any shooting with a fully automatic example of one. So I am taking this 1924 Bulgarian contract example out to the range wth some ammo!

The Madsen is a really interesting ...

France fought the Great War with an array of weapons which were all sub-par in one way or another - the Lebel rifle was obsolescent by 1914, the Berthier was a cavalry carbine forced into rifle service, the Chauchat was an emergency wartime design optimized for production volume instead of qualit...

The Breda Model 30 was the standard Italian light machine gun of World War II, and is a serious contender for “worst machine gun ever”. Yes, given the choice we would prefer to have a Chauchat (which really wasn’t as bad as people today generally think).

The Breda 30 suffered from all manner o...

I had a chance to shoot an LS26 once before, but without the benefit of a magazine loading tool – and so I could only get 4 or 5 rounds into the mag. This time, we have a proper loader, and we can give the gun a proper workout. And I’ll also show you how that loading tool works – it’s almost as n...

Finland’s first domestic light machine gun was the LS-26. The prime designer was Aimo Lahti, but because of his relative inexperience and lack of formal credentials, Lieutenant A.E. Saloranta was assigned to assist him. The two did not get along well, and Lahti effectively designed the weapon on ...

The MG-15 was the first standard flexible-mounted aircraft machine gun adopted by the Luftwaffe in the 1930s. Both it and the MG-17 are evolved from a Rheinmetall/Solothurn design which would also become the Austrian and Hungarian M30 infantry light machine guns. As used by the Luftwaffe, the MG1...

The ZB-26 stands as one of the best magazine-fed light machine guns developed during the 1920s and 30s - it was a very popular gun for small military forces and many countries which did not directly buy it were strongly influenced by it. The Japanese Nambu Type 96 and 99 were heavily based on the...

Today we have a chance to do some shooting with a ZB-26, a German-occupation 8mm light machine gun made at Brno in Czechoslovakia. The ZB-26 does not get nearly as much attention as LMGs made by the better known powers during the war, but it is an excellent weapon. In addition to being adopted by...

The BESAL is a simplified redesign of the Bren light machine gun, developed by a BSA employee named Faulkner. The design of the gun was motivated by the disastrous retreat of the British Army from Dunkirk in 1940, where they abandoned a huge amount of weaponry and war material, including most of ...

The RP-46 was the final iteration of the Degtyarev DP27/DPM light machine gun, modified to feed from Maxim/SG43/PK belts instead of pan magazines. As such, it was able to serve the role of a universal machine gun like the MG34 and MG42 until the Soviet Union was able to develop a true purpose-bui...

Some older footage from the vault - this was a gun I bid on, but did not win. Didn't want to have the whole audience thinking about bidding against me...but now that it's been sold there's no reason not to post the video.

The conversion of the Type 99 Nambu form 7.7x58mm Japanese to 7.62mm NAT...

While the Johnson LMG was issued in limited quantities throughout World War Two, notably to Marine Raiders, Paramarines, and the 1st Special Service Force, the US never issued web gear made for its uniquely-sized magazines. However, a small number of 12-magazine backpacks for the Johnson did find...

During the 1970s and 1980s, Colt wanted to sell not just standard M16 rifle and CAR-15 carbines to foreign military customers, but also wanted to supply support weapons. They put together the Model 621, aka M16A1 “HBAR” (Heavy Barreled Assault Rifle - not the same idea and the HBAR target rifles ...

The Johnson LMG was adopted by the US Marine Corps for specialist units like Paramarines and Raiders, and saw use in some of the fiercest island campaign of the Pacific (in addition to use in Europe by the 1st Special Service Force and others). It was a light and hard-hitting weapon that was well...

In the aftermath of World War One, the Treaty of Versailles strictly limited the number of machine guns that the German military could keep in inventory. The main type that the Germans chose to keep was the MG08/15 (although a substantial number of MG08 guns were kept as well). Through the 1920s ...

The first light machine gun adopted by the United States was the M1909 Benet-Mercie, made by the Hotchkiss company in France. The gun was adopted when the US military realized that machine gun doctrine reuqired different guns for the light and heavy roles, and the M1904 Maxim gun was only suitabl...

The R75A was the last version of Colt’s commercial BAR, with 832 made between August and December of 1942 for the Netherlands Purchasing Commission. It was a derivative of the commercial R75 BAR, with a pistol grip, magazine well cover, and ejection port cover. The R75A added on a folding bipod a...

August Coenders was an independent arms designer in Germany. During the 1930s he spent several years working in England and at the French Puteaux Arsenal, which contributed to a general lack of trust and interest in his designs by the German high command (the man's generally adversarial nature di...

Well, my 8mm French Chauchat finally cleared transfer, as did my application to reactivate it. This was a "dewat", or "Deactivated War Trophy" - a machine gun put on the NFA registry but modified to be non-firing. This is not the same as legal destruction, as the receiver of the gun remained inta...

We have a brief video from a friend of the Forgotten Weapons site showing a standard M1915 Chauchat in use. Although short, the video does a good job of showing the gun's rate of fire and general operation. You can see the open magazine design that caused so much trouble, and see how the heavy re...

This week, we will be featuring all Swiss weapons here at Forgotten Weapons. Kind of like Shark Week, but more land-locked. We'll kick off today with a video showing you around a Swiss LMG-25 light machine gun we found for sale at Cornet & Company in Brussels (a better gun shop than any I've foun...

We met up with Greg - who runs Allegheny Arsenal - at a gun show a couple weeks ago, and this is the first of a couple interviews we did with him on the MG34 and its mount. Greg can do anything that needs to be done to a Lafette mount, and stocks all the parts you'll need to get your 34 running a...