Snabb was a Swedish company created to market a system for converting bolt action rifles into semiautomatic rifles. The system was patented in the US in 1938, making this one of the very last attempts at such a conversion. It appears that the company made a substantial number of overtures to many...

Thanks to a friend in South Africa, we have a chance today to take a look at one of the five prototypes of Tommy Steele's TS V semiauto carbine. This thing is completely ambidextrous (including swappable ejection ports), has an abundance of safety mechanisms, and an integral suppressor complete w...

After designing the bolt action rifle that bears his name, Andre Berthier went on to experiment with self-loading designs. He developed a light machine gun in the years before World War One, but was not able to interest the French government in it. He also submitted that gun for US military consi...

This rifle is the home shop creation of one Wilfred Ellis, a talented gunsmith form Pennsylvania. It is basically a combination of an M14 gas system with an AR15 bolt and locking system, plus an in-line tubular receiver, M60 flash hider, and side-mounted magazine. Not exactly the sort of thing th...

Designed by Gerry Fox in the early 1970s, this carbine saw production sequentially as the Fox Carbine, the TAC-1, and the XF-7 Wasp, as it went through several different manufacturers. It is an open bolt, semiauto carbine sold in both 9mm Parabellum and .45 ACP - and you could get caliber convers...

After World War Two, Colombia adopted the .30-06 cartridge as standard, purchasing a thousand .30-06 FN49 rifles and 19,000 surplus American M1 Garand rifles. With the subsequent development of the 7.62mm NATO cartridge, Colombia experimented briefly with converting their existing Garand rifles t...

One of the rarest patterns of the SKS is the East German type - the Karabiner-S. Total production quantity is not known, but their survival rate is quite low and most of the examples in the US are Vietnam War bring backs. At any rate, the Karabiner-S is not quite an exact copy of the standard SKS...

FN introduced the paratrooper folding-stock version of the FAL rifle in the early 1960s, and it became a very popular addition to their rifle line. Since the recoil spring on the standard pattern FAL runs down the length of the buttstock, fitting a side folding stock required a redesign to the in...

Designed in 1939 by S&W engineer Edward Pomeroy, the S&W Light Rifle is an extremely well manufactured but rather poorly thought out carbine. It is a 9mm Parabellum open-bolt, semiautomatic, blowback carbine feeding from 20-round magazines. It was tested by the US military at Aberdeen Proving Gro...

This is a Model 1923 Thompson Autoloading Rifle, one of a batch of 20 made by Colt for US military testing in 1924. The system is designed on the same basic Blish principle as the Thompsons submachine gun; the idea that two sliding surfaces will lock solidly together under enough pressure, and no...

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...

When the USMC adopted the M1 Garand in 1942, they decided they would like to have a new semiautomatic training rifle in .22 rimfire to go along with it. Eugene Reising, working for Harrington & Richardson, promptly produced a semiauto .22 LR version of his military submachine gun to fulfill that ...

The Ruger Mini-14 is certainly not a “forgotten” weapon, but I think there are some valuable insights to be taken from it. As a company, Ruger has an outstanding track record of making not flashy and exciting guns, but rather guns that are economical and dependable. The Mini-14 is an excellent ex...

In the world of converted semiautomatic “machine guns,” the Browning 1919 is a happy example of one of the most iconic and historically important US machine guns and also one of the cheapest semiautomatic belt fed guns available. This stems from two factors, primarily. One is that the Browning 19...

So, you would like to get an original AR-10 rifle to shoot? Well, the original Armalite AR10 rifles were almost all manufactured by Artillerie-Inrichtingen in the Netherlands, and they were virtually all machine guns. They were made circa 1960-1961, and only a few contracts were made -Cuba, Guate...

The SIG company of Neuhausen Switzerland spent the 1920s, 30s, and 40s working on developmental semiauto rifles to sell both to the Swiss military and abroad. One of the experimental models in the succession of designs was the Model U, of which 16 were made in caliber 7.5x55mm Swiss. It was a gas...

The first successful iteration of John Garand’s rifle was developed in 1921 and refined through 1924. A small batch were made for US military testing in 1924, where it was compared to guns like the Bang, Hatcher-Bang, and most significantly the Colt/Thompson Autoloading Rifle. Garand’s rifle was ...

The CETME Model C would be the basis for the wildly successful H&K 91 / G3 rifle, and a small batch of CETME rifles was brought into the United States as early as 1966. They were imported by the Mars Equipment Corporation of Chicago, and are completely Spanish-made examples of the original CETME....

In 1994, a man named Mark Westrom, owner of Eagle Arms, purchased the husk of the Armalite corporation, and acquired its trademarks. Westrom wanted to create a new commercial .308 AR pattern rifle, and did so under the Armalite AR-10 name. He developed an AR-10 which borrowed some elements from t...

Dozens of countries around the world received M1 Garand rifles from the United States in the decades after World War Two, and Denmark was one of those that not only got some rifle but went so far as to formally adopt the M1 as its post-war standard. The US and Denmark signed a mutual defense agre...

When the Browning Arms Company first began importing semiautomatic FAL rifles from FN in 1959, the submitted an example for evaluation, and ATF determined that it was not a machine gun. The rifle was made with a selector that could not be moved to the fully automatic position, and did not have th...

The H&K SR9 was a the version of the H&K G3/91 designed to comply with (or avoid, if you prefer) the Bush Sr. 1989 import ban on “assault weapons”. About 4,000 of these were imported between 1990 and 1998, and they featured a bare muzzle and plastic thumbhole stock and handguard. The first 1000 o...

When the German Army wanted a new semiauto service rifle in 1941, it received submissions from two companies; Walther and Mauser. Walther’s design didn’t strictly meet the criteria set forth, but it was clearly the better rifle and would eventually win the competition. This involved conducting tr...

In the mid to late 1970s, several different Rhodesian arms designers were basically racing to be the first to come to market with a domestically produced civilian carbine type weapon. Northwood Developments would be the first, designed by former RAF engineer Roger Mansfield and manufactured in Sa...