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Voere SAM-180 - Semiautomatic American 180 SMG Made in Austria?
The American 180 is a .22LR machine gun that fires at a high rate (1300 rpm more or less) from a super-high-capacity magazine (177 rounds). Conceptually it was designed by Richard Casull in the 1960s, but he only produced about 70 of his original M290 design. He sold the rights to the design, and...
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Springfield Kuna: Croatia's New Delayed-Blowback PCC/SMG
The Kuna is a delayed-blowback 9mm pistol/PCC/submachine gun developed by HS Produkt in Croatia and marketed int he US by Springfield Armory. Development on it began in 2020 as a commercial project, but probably also with an eye to military and law enforcement sales. The Croatian police are curre...
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Cabin Fever Challenge 2025: Bloke and Chap Take It On!
Join us on the App! https://weaponsandwar.tv/
Everything you need to know to enter is here: https://www.riflechair.com/cabin-fever-challenge
This year, Bloke and Chap entered divisions 1, 2, 3 and 7, with MAS 36, Lee-Enfield No.4, MAS 49, L1A1 SLR, L39A1 with scope, FAMAS and L85A1 SA80 IW.
Ho...
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Finland's Next Service Rifle (Mostly): Sako ARG S 40
Finland and Sweden are both in the process of adopting AR-pattern rifles, and for the Finns this will be their first service rifle in 5.56mm NATO. It is a transition that has been anticipated for nearly 20 years, but was finally put into high gear by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Finland's ...
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British Rifle L85A1 / SA80 IW: The Mechanical Gory Details (Rare Factory Semi)
In which we look at the details of the mechanics of a factory semi SA80 IW (Individudual Weapon), L85A1 rifle. This one is from 1989, and so does not have any of the 90's A1-era upgrades, nor the A2 upgrades from about a decade later.
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Sterling-built Armalite AR-180 at 300m
The Armalite AR-18 / AR-180 was Armalite's product to compete with the AR-15 that they had licensed to Colt so could no longer produce themselves. It's a lightweight, stamped construction, but how does it perform on target with a 3x Primary Arms SLx microprism on a Stormwerkz mount?
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Mean Arms' Bearing Delay System
Mean Arms has developed probably the most refined and sophisticated 9mm AR delaying system on the market, what they call Bearing Delay. This began as an exploration into fitting HK-style roller delay into and AR, and ended up with a system using three spherical bearings to redirect chamber pressu...
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PSA/H&R Clones the Department of Energy Colt 9mm SMG
Palmetto State Armory, under their Harrington & Richardson brand, has released a particularly neat model of 9mm AR. They talked about doing this "at some point" at SHOT Show 2024, but lo and behold it's here and available on the cusp of SHOT 2025! Specifically, this is the Colt 633, an extra-shor...
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Experimental AG-42B Conversion to 7.62mm NATO
Circa 1954, Sweden was starting to look for a new self-loading rifle to adopt for its infantry. The 6.5x55mm cartridge was a good round, but the idea of having ammunition compatibility with its neighbors was appealing, and NATO was standardizing on the new 7.62x51mm round. This rifle is an experi...
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KH-9: B&T Remakes the SITES Spectre Just Because It's Cool
Karl Brügger, CEO of B&T, is a true gun nerd and avid competitive shooter. When he got his hands on the Spectre SMG with its quad-stack magazine and weird DA/decocker fire control system, he thought it was really neat. So neat that he decided to buy the project from its Italian creators and put i...
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BD-44: The New Semiauto Sturmgewehr from D-K Productions
D-K Productions is a collaboration between the German company Sport System Dittrich (SSD) and an American partner. SSD has been making reproductions of German World War Two small arms for something like 20 years - including Sturmgewehrs. Their guns are really good recreations of the 1940s origina...
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Stamm-Zeller 1902: A Swiss Straight-Pull Converted to Semiauto
Today's rifle was designed by a Swiss inventor named Hans Stamm while working for the Zeller et Cie company in Appenzell Switzerland. The company originally made embroidering machinery, but turned to military rifle parts subcontracting to bring in additional revenue in the early 1890s. Stamm had ...
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A Beautiful Factory Semiauto SIG MKPO
During the 1930s, SIG Neuhausen made a series of really beautiful submachine guns. They were the MK series, offered in either 500mm / 19.7 inch barrels for military use or 300mm / 11.8 inch for police use. The first pattern was the MK-O, which had a rate-reducing system built into the action (whi...
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Aimpoint's Only Gun: The PC-80 Symmetrical Action
Today we are looking at the entire scope of Aimpoint's firearms development division...which is actually just this one firearm. Aimpoint was founded in 1975 as a partnership between Arne Ekstrand (a Swedish inventor with an idea for a brand new "red dot" type of optic) and Gunnar Sandberg (a weal...
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AG42 Ljungman: Sweden Adopts a Battle Rifle in WWII
Sweden developed, adopted, and produced a new self-loading rifle during World War Two. The process began in 1938, with an attempt by the state rifle factory to convert Swedish Mauser bolt actions into semiautomatic; that did not go well. Trials for a ground-up semiauto followed shortly thereafter...
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Ljungman Updates: the AG-42 vs AG-42B
In 1953, the Swedish military launched a program to refurbish and refit all of the Ag m/42 rifles in inventory. Aside from replacing broken parts and worn barrels, the program also made a number of improvements to the rifles:
* Auxiliary front magazine catch added
* Large gripping lugs added to ... -
Dillinger Gang's Winchester 1907 Self-Loader: The Lebman Conversion
Hyman Lehman was a gunsmith in Texas who made a variant of firearms for some of the most notorious gangsters of the 1930s. One of his specialties was to take the Winchester Model 1907 Self-Loader and cut the barrel down, attach a Cutt's Compensator, and a Thompson gun vertical front grip on a rep...
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New Imports: French MAS 49/56 and MAS 36/51 Rifles
Yeah, I'm a sucker for nice French rifles. So when Old Western Scrounger brought in another batch of them, I offered to do a video. These are rifles taken out of French long-term storage, having been rebuilt at French arsenals to like-new condition, and are in beautiful condition.
Full video on ...
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Semiauto MGs: How Are They Made?
Semiauto versions of machine guns are a way to have examples of historically significant and mechanically interesting guns without having to wrangle with NFA transfers and the astronomical price of transferrable legal machine guns. However, they are not particularly common. Very few OEM manufactu...
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Estonia's Much Better Sniper: the M14 TP2
The first Estonian sniper rifle built on the M14 was the "TP" - a very poorly done model with a lousy scope, worse mount, and unhelpful stock. These were made in 2000, and in 2008 a new iteration came out. This was the TP2, which now used a B&T mount, standard stock (with cheek riser), and excell...
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Black Hawk Down: Randy Shughart's M14
Sergeant Randy Shughart and Gary Gordon were both awarded posthumous Congressional Medals of Honor for their actions in Mogadishu in October 1993. As portrayed in the film "Black Hawk Down", the two Delta Force men volunteered (demanded, really) to be dropped onto the wreck of Super 6-4 alone to ...
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The RK 62 M3 Clone I Used for Finnish Brutality 2024
This year at Finnish Brutality 2024, I was able to use a semiauto clone of a Finnish military RK 62 M3 rifle. This is the latest upgrade to the Finnish issued RK 62 rifle. Starting in 2015, the Finnish Defense Forces began a program to update some of their stock of RK62s. The goal was to add opti...
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Estonian R20L DMR Clone at the Range
Today we are out at the range with a semiauto clone of the Estonian R20L "Rahe" designated marksman's rifle. These rifles are based on the LMT MARS-H platform, with a few tweaks requested by the Estonian Defense Forces (like the bayonet lug). While LMT has a commercial semiauto copy of the 5.56mm...
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FN M249S SAW at the Range
We previously looked at the mechanics of FN's semiauto version of the US SAW, the M249S. Today we are taking it out to the range for some shooting...