Basically nothing is known about this rifle in terms of who created it or when - but it is a pretty interesting example of an attempt to convert a bolt action rifle to semiautomatic. This rifle began life as a standard Dutch Mannlicher rifle. The conversion was done here be splicing a Lewis Gun g...

The SIG 210, aka the P49, was a magnificent pistol, but really too expensive for a modern military sidearm. In the 1960s, the Swiss military began looking for a new service sidearm that would be a bit less costly, and SIG developed the 220 in response, which would ultimately be adopted as the P75...

Today we are looking at a pair of Steyr 1893 trials revolvers. Only about 100 of these were made, primarily for Austro-Hungarian military trials. These two are early pattern examples, with Pieper-type gas seal systems in which the cylinder is cammed forward upon firing and an extra-long cartridge...

The US Army ACR (Advanced Combat Rifle) program was an effort to find a new type of infantry rifle which could increase the practical accuracy of the M16 by a whopping 100% in the early 1990s. Building on a legacy of similar programs like SALVO and SPIW, the basic idea being tried were extremely ...

Today we are looking at a unique military trials Steyr-Hahn M1911 pistol which has been fitted with an adjustable tangent rear sight. The standard model of the Steyr-Hahn has a fixed rear notch, but it seems that a potential client requested (or Steyr anticipated that someone would request) and a...

After the Mp44/StG44 Sturmgewehr was starting to see substantial production and field use, the German military and the Mauser company began working on a way to simplify production of the weapon. The design for the Gerät 06H actually began with the Gerät 03, an attempt to make a roller-locked G43 ...

In 1943, the British government began a program to develop a shortened and lightened version of the No1 SMLE rifle, for production in India and Australia - where the national ordnance factories had not converted to production of the No4 rifle. This prototype is the first pattern produced by the I...

Robert Roy was a career Colt employee, who began his work as an engineer in 1963 (including work on the 1971/SSP pistols and the CMG machine gun series) and retired in 1993 as Director of International Sales. One of his side projects appears to have been experimentation into auto-ejecting revolve...

Production of the Colt Pocket Hammerless (aka the Model M) pretty much died at the end of World War Two. Military contracts ended, and the civilian market was quite weak - Colt shipped just 132 of the .32 caliber guns between 1946 and 1953, and only a handful of .380s at the same time. Several pr...

While Harrington & Richardson was making M14 rifles for the United States military, they were also experimenting with other variations on the design. Among these was the “Guerrilla Gun”, an shortened and lightened M14. The barrel was reduced in length by 4.5 inches and also reduced significantly ...

Gustloff was a large industrial concern in Germany which made many different weapons for the military. In addition to these, its attempted to market a small-caliber pistol for police or SS use. This pistol used an alloy frame (with steel inserts for durability in crucial areas) and steel slide, w...

The Winchester G30R is the final iteration of David Marshall Williams' work on a full power .30 caliber military rifle. The project began with a design by Ed Browning (John Browning's half brother) using a tilting bolt an annular gas piston, manufactured for US military trials by Colt. It moved t...

I have gotten quite a lot of questions about this experimental Austrian 1915 machine gun or submachine gun since it was included in the Battlefield One computer game. Unfortunately, the sum total of information we have on this weapon is three photographs found in an Austrian archive. Extrapolatin...

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...

Thanks to the generosity of a collector in the Association of Maltese Arms Collectors and Shooters, we have a chance today to take a look at a pre-production FG-42, serial number 015. This is one of the guns manufactured by Rheinmetall (the series production would be handed over to Krieghoff) in ...

Charles Clement is best known for a series of civilian pocket pistol made in the years before World War One, but today we are looking at a prototype Clement military pistol from 1914. This gun retains most of the same mechanical features of Clement's pocket guns, but is scaled up to the 9x20mm Br...

In the 1870s and 1880s, France experimented with a huge variety of repeating rifle designs, including tube magazines hopper magazines, box magazines, and all sorts of other unique systems (more than 40 different types in total). These experimental rifles appear from time to time, but only a small...

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 ...

This rifle is a Winchester semiauto prototype that has no documentation I could find in any source. So, today we will take a look at what we can possibly extrapolate from its various features. It will be a fun exercise, and if any archival record of it ever comes to light we will get to see if an...

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 ...

The AR-14 was the subject of a widely-seen political gaffe a while back - but what was the real AR-14? Because yes, there was one! It was one of many firearms planned by Armalite, but not put into production...

The Sten Mk4 was developed experimentally in 1943 for use by British paratroops. It used a remarkably awful folding stock along with a shortened receiver and barrel to make a very compact package - albeit one that must have been very uncomfortable to shoot. Several different models were made, wit...

Yesterday we looked at the mechanics and the history of the Sten Mk4(S), and today we have it out at the range! The very short barrel and its porting reduce the velocity of standard 115gr 9mm ammunition below the speed of sound, and so the gun is very quiet. To my surprise, the complete lack of c...

When Melvin Johnson's rifle design was first going through US military testing in 1938, it was set up to use box magazines. These magazines were a problem - they were not quite fully perfected, and were causing a lot of the problem that the rifle was having. Johnson opted to withdraw the rifle fr...