One of the many revolver systems designed to work around the Rollin White patent was the Pant's Patent cupfire revolver, made by Merwin & Bray in several calibers (.28, .30, and .42). This particular example is a nice on in .42 (which is the diameter of the cartridge case; the projectile is actua...

Needlefire rifles were developed in the 1830s and represented and early effective type of breechloading rifle. As such, they were adopted by both German and French armies - but only in rifle form. Needlefire handguns were much less common. This particular design was patented in 1852 by a man name...

Elmer Keith's No.5 Single Action Army is arguably the most famous custom revolver ever made. Keith had it built in 1928 after developing a friendship with Harold Croft, another revolver enthusiast. Croft had shown Keith his own custom revolvers, which he had numbered 1 through 4. Croft had been t...

I've been taking a lot of big pistols to the (alleged) BackUp Gun Match, and I figured it was time to try out something that actually would quality as a back-up gun. So, I got my hands on one of NAA's .22 Mini-Revolvers. This is the smallest practically shootable "real" gun made, and they are rel...

Taking what they had learned in developing their series of large-frame .44 caliber revolvers, Smith & Wesson introduced the “Baby Russian” in 1876 as their first .38 caliber revolver. They actually developed the cartridge first (146 grains at 740 fps), and then designed the revolver around it. Th...

Michael Kaufman was a talented gunsmith who worked for the Webley company from 1878 until 1881. While there, he patented a substantially improved clockwork for the gun, removing 5 parts from the system and improving the trigger press. He was paid a royalty for this system, which was tracked by th...

At the top end of Hopkins & Allen’s revolver line were the XL Navy, XL Police, and XL-8 Army. We covered the Army in a separate video, and today we are looking at an XL Navy. This was a .38 caliber rimfire revolver with a 6-shot cylinder and a 6 inch barrel. It was single action only, with a pivo...

"XL" was a brand name used by Hopkins & Allen to cover several different styles of revolver, but the first were a series of rimfire, spur-hammer pocket guns made in the 1870s and 1880. These were mostly very simple, chambered for a range of cartridges from .22 rimfire to .41 rimfire. Some example...

The Mauser brothers' first handgun was the single shot C77, which they quickly followed with the C78 "zig zag" revolver, so named for the cam grooves on the circumference of its cylinder. What we are looking at today is the patent model submitted for the brothers' patent on the hinged-frame versi...

In 1883, the Brazilian government decided to purchase 3,000 new revolvers, and they chose the Mauser Model 1878 "Zigzag" to procure. The officer charged with making the purchase in Europe, however, appears to have done some of his own investigation and unilaterally decided to buy Nagant revolvers...

The rarest variation of the Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver is the .38 ACP model. Only 341 of these were made by Webley, in an attempt to compete with the new semiautomatic pistols appearing on the market - most notably the Colt Model 1900 and Model 1902. The Colt was chambered for .38 ACP, a r...

In my previous video on the Albion-production No2 revolvers, I said that the removal of the single action capability and hammer spur from the design was done because of problems armored vehicle crews had with the hammers catching on hatches. That was wrong, and today I want to correct it and also...

There were probably less than a hundred of these Pryse-Patent break-action .577 revolvers made in total, and this one has managed to maintain an excellent nickel finish. Pushing approximately a 400 grain bullet at about 725 fps, these 5-shot revolvers were made as last-ditch “stopping” guns in ca...

"The Formidable" was the name given to one of many different civilian pocket-carry revolvers made by the French Manufrance firm in St Etienne. This particular model was introduced in 1895, although it went through a significant redesign in 1902. The example I have here is the later pattern, which...

Tacticool is not a modern creation - people have been making arms that are impractical but cool looking for centuries. As a case in point, I present this Model 1864 Milanese style saber-revolver. Several different variations on this theme were made in the mid 1800s, but this one closely follows t...

I previously filmed one of the Model 1884 Luxembourg Gendarmerie Nagant revolvers, but I got my hands on one with the original bayonet, and I wanted to show you that. These are extremely rare revolvers, especially with the matching original bayonets.

One of the lessons the British military took from the Great War was that without extensive training and practice, most people were not very effective with a large-bore revolver. So in 1922, they undertook a program (via Webley) to develop a smaller sidearm that could be used with much less traini...

While Rollin White’s patent for the bored-through cylinder was a massively important element in the development of Smith & Wesson as a company, White’s actual firearms design was impractical and never produced. In fact, there is only one firearm that actually bears his name - the solid frame .22...

"Manufrance" was the common abbreviated name for Manufacture d'Armes et Cycles de Saint Etienne, a massive mail-order catalog company in France for many decades. Like Sears Roebuck in the United States, one could get pretty much anything from the Manufrance, including firearms. In the years leadi...

Long associated with Parisian street gangs called "Apaches" (after the American Indian tribe), there were two main patterns of combination knife/knuckle/firearm made in the mid/late 1800s in France. This one was designed by J. Delhaxhe, and features a solid frame set up as brass knuckles. The fir...

Today we have not so much an examination of a specific firearms, but rather a look at how Clint Eastwood’s film portrayal of Dirty Harry Callahan drove a huge wave of popularity of the Smith & Wesson Model 29 - “the most powerful handgun in the world.”

This revolver, designed by Fordyce Beals (how cool of a name is that?), was developed while Colt’s patent on using the hammer to index the cylinder was still in effect. To avoid that patent, this Beals design uses the trigger to rotate and index the cylinder, with the hammer being cocked separate...

The Colt 1902 Philippine Model revolver is a modified version of the Colt 1878 Double Action Army or Frontier model pistol. This was Colt’s first entry into the large-frame double action revolver market, following just after the 1877 small frame Lightning and Thunderer designs. It was a marginall...

Bloke's gorgeous platinum-haired wife, through being a bizarre and dozy git, inspires him to invite you into the rich history and wonderful world of S&W hammer block safeties through the ages.

Featuring a century-old .455 Hand Ejector Second Model, an M&P in .38 S&W, and a very early 586. Plus...