This pistol is something of a mystery - its design comes from the experimental Mauser HsP of the mid 1970s. It uses a short recoil system with a pivoting locking block vaguely like a P38, and was an unsuccessful competitor to the H&K P7 in German police trials. The design was dropped by Mauser by...

The Spanish firm of Garate Anitua y Cia manufactured this copy of the Mannlicher 1901/1905 pistol for just a brief period around 1910. It is not a straight copy, as the Mannlicher was chambered for its own 7.63mm Mannlicher cartridge and fed using stripper clips and a fixed internal magazine whil...

When Finland decided to replace the Luger as its service handgun, they turned to Finland's most famous arms designer, Aimo Lahti. After a few iterations, Lahti devised a short recoil semiautomatic pistol with a vertically traveling locking block, not too different from a Bergmann 1910 or Type 94 ...

Eugene Golubtsov, aka LugerMan, is manufacturing reproduction .45ACP caliber Luger pistols, based on the original blueprints of the 1907 pattern US Army trials guns. When he offered to send me one to try out, how could I say no?

I have had some rather unimpressive experiences trying to shoot s...

Thanks to my friends at Bear Arms in Scottsdale, we have an H&K P8A1 to take a look at today - the current Bundeswehr issue version of the USP. Chambered for 9x19mm and adopted in 1994, only a few things differentiate the P8/P8A1 from the standard commercial USP. Most notably is the safety, which...

The Republican factions in the Spanish Civil War had much more trouble obtaining arms than the Nationalist elements, and this led to several attempts to build pistols in small-scale workshops. The best known of these are the RE and Ascaso copies of the Astra 400, but in the city of Barcelona a gr...

China adopted this pistol in 1998 in a domestic 5.8x21mm cartridge, and also manufactured examples like this one in 9x19mm Parabellum for export. It is a design built around a sheet metal skeleton holding the fire control parts, with a polymer grip assembly that can be changed out. A rotating bar...

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...

Made after World War Two until 1957, the Ballester Campeon was a .22 rimfire competition pistol built on the frame of the Argentine Ballester-Molina .45 ACP service pistol. Two versions were made, a standard 5 inch (127mm) barrel with normal sights and the longer 7.5 inch (190mm) Campeon model wi...

In the years following World War Two, the Bernardelli company in Italy made an attempt to enter the full-power pistol market with a simple blowback 9mm Parabellum design. They basically scaled up their existing .32/.380 pocket pistol designs to the larger cartridge, and actually designed this new...

We have been able to find very little information on the Vitali 1910 automatic pistol, but we did have the opportunity to take a look at one recently. It is very clearly marked Vitali 1910 Terni, but bears no other markings whatsoever. The gun is much more typical of its era than the Hino-Komuro,...

Japanese Papa Nambu Pistol with Matching Stock

We have another experimental German WWII piece for you today, Mauser's last-ditch "Volkspistole". It was developed at the end of the war as an extremely inexpensive home guard weapon, although how much use a pistol would have been in fighting off the Red Army and US Army is pretty questionable. T...

A general look at a couple of early automatic pistol designs, and what they have in common. We have a Bergmann-Bayard M1910/21, a C96 "Broomhandle" Mauser, and an Astra M900.

The Chap takes you through disassembling and reassembling his Finnish Lahti L35, which is mechanically NOT AT ALL A LUGER-DERIVATIVE! Also, he explains how it works.

Chappie gets delivery of a new French pistol for his collection. It doesn't appear to function like most of his favourite toys though...

It's always interesting to be able to try two particular pistols out next to each other on the range, particularly when one is a modification of the other. In this case, the Daddy-Gat is a 1974-dated FN Browning GP-35 Hi-Power, and the Son-Gat is an FN BDA-9 (not to be confused with the other BDA...

Well, there's only one fun way to test whether an FN Browning Hi Power magazine will fit and function in an FN BDA-9 (aka HP-DA or DA-HP, as in double action Hi Power) and vice-versa, and that's to test it out on the range! Will we confirm or refute what the Intartubes says about it?

With a so...

The Ruby is simple and of barely adequate quality for a service pistol but nonetheless rugged and reliable. It is often the case however, that the user can't disassemble it for cleaning.
Why is this and what can be done about it?

Chap aims to be (slightly) more competitive at Finnish Brutality 2023 and has got himself an Arex Delta Gen.2 to go with his VHS2. What are his first impressions and nerdy mechanical analysis of this pistol and what mods does he have in mind?

Everyone has that one gun that they love and that has nothing to do with the rest of your collection. It may be ugly, or inaccurate or tacky or just plain weird but you love it no matter what anyone says. For the Chap that gun is the humble TT33 or in this case a slightly more modern Zastava M57A...

Walther TPHs are known to be testy tempestuous little things and one of Mrs Chap's ones is exactly that. Light strikes are fairly common so the springs have been replaced but there was one more thing that could be done to hopefully solve the issue for good.

Also, lathe and mill go brrrrr!

Bloke and Chap get an Arsenal Strike One 9mm pistol thrust into their hands, and give their first impressions! The mechanism is kinda cool, as if Browning and Lahti had a child.

In early 1937 France adopts not one, but two service pistols, both in 7.65 Long for ammunition compatibility with the upcoming SMG (MAS38). The most widely known is the 1935A mostly due to being the template for the SIG P.49, but the other pistol, the 1935S, is usually dismissed as being somehow ...