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In brief, the problem is that the guns will often run away if steps are not taken to prevent it. This is not a clever way to get a machine gun (although I'm sure plenty of fools will see it as such); it is a serious safety problem because it can often cause out of battery detonation of cartridges...

Star Firearms: http://amzn.to/2c29MyS
Astra Firearms: http://amzn.to/2c29OXw

Leonardo Antaris has written massive and excellent volumes on two of the major companies in the Spanish firearms industry, Star and Astra. Both of these companies made a wide range of military and commercial handguns, a...

The Spanish company Gabilondo y Urresti, later to become known as Llama, introduced this locked-breech .45 ACP copy of the Colt 1911 in 1924. It was not a slavish copy, however, and introduced a captive recoil spring which would be the inspiration for that feature in the Polish Vis-35 and many la...

The Astra 900 was a pistol developed to take advantage of a large Chinese demand for semiauto pistols with shoulder stocks, following on the massive sales of the Mauser C96 "Broomhandle" in that country. In the 1920s and 30s, civil war in China drove a huge market in arms, but international treat...

The Campo-Giro was Spain's first indigenous self-loading military pistol, adopted in 1912 to replace the Belgian 1908 Bergmann-Mars. Only a small number were made of the original M1913 variety, with the vast majority being the later and slightly more refined M1913/16. This particular example is ...

When the Spanish Civil War erupted, the Nationalist/Fascist forces quickly captured all the major arms production factories in the country. This left the Republican forces dependent on arms importation and the creation of new factories. The two major efforts to make weapons in Republican-controll...

The CETME-L was Spain's replacement for the CETME Modelo C, which was the 7.62x51mm rifle that was essentially adopted by Germany as the G3 in the 1950s. By the 1980s Spain needed to move to the new NATO standard caliber, 5.56x45mm. A domestic design was preferred, so rather than but HK-93 rifles...

The miquelet lock is generally considered the first true, mature flintlock action in the progression of firearms technology. It combined the pan cover and frizzen (the plate against which the flint strikes) into a single multi-purpose part. This particular pistol is a good example of the characte...

The JoLoAr pistol was a combination of a poor-selling and unremarkable Spanish blowback semiauto pistol called the Sharpshooter and an idea by a man named Jose Lopez Arnaiz (whose name is the source of the pistol's name). Arnaiz conceived the idea of mounting a lever (palanca in Spanish) onto a p...

The Radium was the predecessor to the much more well-known (and more successful) Ruby pistol made by Gabilonda y Urresti, which was sold to the French Army by the hundreds of thousands during World War One. The Radium was very unusual in its magazine design, which featured a spring loaded sliding...

The Spanish military used the CETME-L rifle as its standard rifle in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to the standard model, they also had two versions of marksman's CETME-Ls. These were designated the LV ("V" for "visor", or scope). The Army used a domestic 4x scope of tradition design made by E...

The Spanish adopted the 5.56mm CETME-L rifle in the mid 1980s, although they only used it until the late 1990s, when it was replaced by the G36. One of the sub variants made was the LC (“Corto”) shortened version with a 12.6″ (320mm) barrel and collapsing stock. This adaptation actually required ...

Today I am out at the range to do some side-by-side shooting with the CETME-L and the CETME-LC. These are both MarColMar examples, in the original Spanish military configuration (ie, iron sights only).

The LC model has a bit snappier recoil and more muzzle climb, which I suspect is due to the ...

Today, a comparison between a semiauto CETME-L rifle from MarColMar Firearms and one from HMG (albeit an example I built myself).

The AMELI (which is a contraction of "ametralladora ligera", or light machine gun) was introduced by CETME in 1981, and adopted by the Spanish military as the MG82. It was a counterpart LMG to the new CETME-L 5.56mm rifles, and is a mechanically fascinating design.

The AMELI is a roller-delaye...

Star introduced their first compact tilting-barrel pistol (the Model D) in 1922. The Spanish military was interested in something along these lines, but the Model D was intended to be a civilian pocket-carry gun, and was just too small for military use. What was needed was something still compact...

The standard Spanish infantry rifle from 1943 until the adoption of the CETME was the M43, an 8mm Mauser short rifle made at the La Coruña arsenal. As is fairly common, a sniper rifle variant was made form the standard rifles, with an early version made in the mid 1950s and a later model about a ...

In the late 1980s, the Spanish gunmaker Star decided to join the new hot trend of 10mm semiauto pistols. The cartridge was getting a lot of press, and Star saw this as an opportunity too ride the wave and also the get a pistol on the market that would attract IPSC competitors. Unlike some compani...

The firm of Anitua Y Charola in Eibar, Spain (later renamed Charola Y Anitua) was founded in 1880 or 1881, and their first substantial product was a copy of the American Merwin & Hulbert revolver. They were made with hopes of getting Spanish military adoption, and thus were chambered for the .44 ...

Edward Felk was an Australian who decided to produce semiauto pistols in Australia. In 1994 he patented a couple features of his new design, and set about finding a way to produce it. He ended up subcontracting with Star of Spain to produce barrels and slides, while the polymer frames were produc...

A very small batch of special target model pistols was made at the very end of Astra 400 production in 1945. They were fitted with Patridge front sights and adjustable revolver-style square-notch rear sights, much improved over the stock Astra 400 sights. In addition, they were fitted with a spec...

Star introduced the Model A as the commercial sale version of the Model 1920 and 1921 pistols which they had entered into Spanish military trials in 1920. The pistol was rejected by the Army in favor of the Astra 400, but the Spanish Guardia Civil adopted it as their standard sidearm. The origina...

The Model 700 Special was an attempt by Astra to piggyback on the popularity of the FN Model 1910 automatic pistol. Astra took their Model 100 (a renamed Ruby pistol of WWI lineage) and changed the styling to resemble the FN gun, including adding a rotating mainspring cap around the barrel, as th...