When the British began developing a shortened version of the No4 Lee Enfield in 1943 (which would become the No5 MkI "Jungle Carbine"), the development process included work with some rather older rifles. What we have here is a 1922 production No1 MkV rifle cut down as a trials prototype for the ...

The Austro-Hungarian Empire went into World War One with the Steyr M95 straight-pull rifle as its standard infantry arm. Heavy losses in just the first few months of the war made it clear that the existing stockpiles of those M95 rifles would not suffice, however. Older guns were pulled out of in...

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...

The Ross MkII (aka Ross 1905) was a reasonably successful rifle design, but it lacked a few elements that the Canadian military would have preferred. Most significantly, it was not compatible with the charger clip that was introduced for the Lee Enfield rifles in 1907. The rifle we have today is ...

A while back I made this video about my full-fat Sterling No.4 Lee-Enfield conversion to 7.62 NATO.

Well, the Enfield L8 conversions are a little different. But why though? Here we've got an L39A1 doing stand-in duty, and we'll explain it with reference to Sterling's patent...

Brought to you by Varusteleka and Sako, Finnish Brutality 2021 was run as a much-reduced private event to meet Finnish Covid-19 event size regulations. We only had three stages and 7 shooters, but the full public match has been rescheduled for October 22-24 of 2021!

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While in Finland for Finnish Brutality 2021, the question naturally arose of how bolt action rifles would fare in the snow. Bloke and Chap from Bloke on the Range decided to find out, and peer-pressured me into doing the same thing with my M39 Finnish Mosin. Thanks to Sako for sponsoring the matc...

As part of his effort to imbue Italy with a fascist culture, Mussolini formed the ONB, or National Balilla Organization as a replacement for all other youth organizations in Italy in 1926. It was intended for boys aged 6 to 18, and included military training. Older boys practiced shooting and dri...

One of the biggest arsenals in China in the 20th century was the Hanyang Arsenal, built in 1890 by the Qing dynasty to help modernize China’s military. The fist rifle to be made there was a copy of the German Gewehr 88 commission rifle (designated Type 88), which began production in 1895. A few c...

When the French occupied the Mauser factory in April 1945, they found all the tooling to produce .22 caliber rifles still in place and in good order (among other things). The French military did not have a proper training rifle at the time, and they decided to have Mauser design and produce one....

Once Lee-Metford rifle production was in place, the British began working on a carbine version of the same action for their cavalry. In 1893 a trial run of 100 carbines were made, and today we are looking at serial number 32 of that batch. These carbines differ in several ways from the ultimately...

Today we are taking a look at a really interesting Mle 1907-15 Berthier rifle. This was the substitute pattern adopted by France as an infantry rifle to supplement the Lebel in 1915, and this particular one is one of the very first examples made. It has a carbine-style bent bolt handle, which was...

Today's rifle is a German Karabiner 98k, made by JP Sauer in 1944 and marked with the appropriate receiver code, "ce". This is from the final year of JP Sauer production of the K98k, before they transitioned to making the MP44 instead. It gives us a chance to look at how production standards chan...

The stalwart No1 MkIII "Smelly" served the United Kingdom well during the First World War, but by the 1920s it was growing obsolescent. The war had revealed a number of shortcomings of the design, and in the interwar years the British developed a replacement. The main issues that the new rifle wo...

When we think of "last-ditch" rifles, we normally think of 1945 and the very end of World War Two. For the British, however, the lowest ebb of the war was in 1941 and 42, and it is during that period that the Lee Enfield was at is crudest. British ordnance instituted a number of simplifications t...

The final standard pattern of the venerable Lee Enfield as a standard-issue service rifle was the No4 MkII, introduced after the end of World War Two. The new pattern was adopted to resolve problems that had come about because of wartime simplifications to the rifle. Specifically, the use of kiln...

The No.5 MkI Enfield, commonly called the "jungle carbine" is nearly the shortest-lived rifle in British military service. Introduced in 1944, they were declared obsolete in 1947 as the result of insoluble accuracy problems. The guns were originally developed from regular No4 Enfield rifles with ...

When Hungary separated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War One, it began to slowly rebuild its military equipment. The eventually led to carbine conversions of old M95 rifles using the new 8x56mm rimmed cartridge, which were designated the 31M. However, the Hungarians were not satisf...

Thanks to the 1 Shepherd cadre for making Midnight Brutality possible! And thanks to our excellent match sponsors:

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Midnight Brutality was a 6-stage all-nighttime match held at the Echo Valley Tr...

Just as World War One broke out in Europe, TC Johnson was working on a new Mauser-based sporting rifle design for the Winchester company. With the war, Johnson added options for military configurations (handguard, bayonet lug, etc) and presented the design (at this point called the Model A) to Wi...

I am happy that the practice of sporterizing military rifles has fallen out of favor, but sometimes one can throw the baby out with the bathwater. Before decrying a nice rifle as Bubba’s sporterization project, it’s worth making sure the gun in question isn’t actually a factory sporting rifle. Th...

"Arming the Dragon" by Dolf Goldsmith is now available and shipping:
https://www.headstamppublishing.com/purchase/arming-the-dragon-by-dolf-l-goldsmith

One of the most common rifles in Warlord-era China was the Mauser Model 98 short rifle. Various Chinese armies bought large numbers of them from...

One of the significant foreign rifles in Finnish service during the Winter War and Continuation War was the Swedish M96 Mauser. These rifles began arriving in Finland even before Finland's independence, and in 1919 the Civil Guard was given ownership of 1,390 of them. The numbers increased slowly...

In the wake of World War Two, much of Europe was awash in small arms - but there were still organizations looking to purchase new arms rather than use the available surplus. The Gemeentepolitie Amsterdam (Amsterdam Municipal Police), for example, formed a Submachine Gun and Carbine Brigade in 194...