The ZK-381 was designed by Josef Koucký, his first design of 1938 (hence 381). This is one of the last of the Czech pre-war self-loading rifle projects, of which there were quite a lot. It uses a tilting bolt and a short-stroke gas piston, with ZB26 machine gun magazines and chambered for 7.92mm ...

The CZ247 was developed for Czechoslovakia's post-war submachine gun trials, where it was pitted against the ZB47. It was a simple blowback 9x19mm SMG with a number of interesting elements, most notably the ability to fire with the magazine either vertical or horizontal. In theory, this made the ...

The URZ (Univerzální Ruční Zbraň, or Universal Hand Weapon) was a 1966 project designed by Jiří Čermák (designer of the vz.58 rifle). He envisioned a weapons system family with largely interchangeable elements that could be configured as a service rifle, carbine, light machine gun, vehicular mach...

Alois Tomiška, best know for the Little Tom pistol, was one of the original founders of the South Bohemia Armory, which became CZ of Strakonice. The first pistol produced by the company was his "Fox" design a .25 ACP pocket gun. As originally designed, it used a folding trigger without a trigger ...

The FK Brno is a take on the classic CZ75 pistol made in the Czech Republic. It was originally released as a boutique steel-framed gun, and then later as a much more affordable polymer-framed model. I have one of those polymer framed ones, with barrels for both 10mm Auto and the unique 7.5mm FK c...

When CZ developed the vz.38 pistol for the Czechoslovak military, they made a number of attempts to also sell it on the international export market. This involved offering some various changes in configuration for different clients - in this case, scaling it down from .380ACP to .32 ACP. It also ...

The ZB37 began in 1930 as a design by none other than classic Czech arms designer Vaclav Holek. The Czechoslovakian military was still using the Schwarzlose heavy MG, and wanted something to replace it. To fill all the roles intended, there would eventually be three different models of the ZB37 -...

Military interest in a submachine gun was late in Czechoslovakia, but by the late 1930s a development program was put into place. Interestingly, the main use case for an SMG was seen as being a replacement for a rifle-caliber LMG in fortification mounts. The thought process seems to have been tha...

The "Kevin" (sometimes called a ZP-98) was developed by Czech gunsmith Antonín Zendl and introduced at the IWA show in 2007. It was a micro-compact pocket pistol chambered for either .380 ACP or 9mm Makarov (the Kevin M). It held six rounds in its magazine, and the most notable feature is a pair...

The ZB47 was developed at Brno as a contender for Czech military submachine gun adoption in the late 1940s. The Czech Army had technically adopted a submachine gun prior to World War Two (the vz.38; video on that is coming a bit later) but production did not begin before the arrival of German tro...

Vaclav Holek's first machine gun design for the Czech military was the Praga I, built in 1922 and based heavily on the Vickers/Maxim system. However, it became clear that the military wanted something lighter and more portable, and so the next year he heavily updated the design to this, the Praga...

Today I am in Vlašim in the Czech Republic, where Sellier & Bellot has allowed me to film a tour of their ammunition plant. This is one of the largest ammo manufacturers in the world, and they start with basic raw material like lead, copper, and brass and ship out complete case ammunition. The ma...

When Germany took over Czechoslovakia, one of the things they did was buy out a controlling interest in what became known as Waffenwerke Brunn. Headquartered in Prague, the company had two factories; one in Brno (Czechia) and one in Bystrica (Slovakia). The Bystrica factory was already making vz2...

The Praga I was the first machine gun design from noted Czech arms designed Vaclav Holek. Three examples were made for Czech military testing in 1922, but they were not acceptable. Instead, this design served as the first stepping stone to the eventual development of the ZB-26, perhaps the best o...

The Krása project (which translates as "beauty", but is also a shortening of "short assault rifle" - "KRÁtký SAmopal") is a fascinating piece of Czech small arms development. In 1976, the Czechoslovakian military requested development of a compact personal weapon for special troops (paratroops, a...

When Czechoslovakia began looking for new small arms in the early 1920s, one of the things they were interested in was a "samostřil" - something akin to the automatic rifle in English. A select-fire weapon intended to be fired from the shoulder or hip - heavier than a basic rifle but lighter than...

I spent several days filming some fantastic Czech small arms with the VHU - the Czech Military History Institute. The Army Museum Žižkov is a part of the Institute, and they have a 3-story museum full of cool exhibits open to the public in Prague. If you have a chance to visit, it's definitely wo...

From the Mauser bolt action to the AK and AR, all new military rifles take time to perfect. With the Bren 3, CZ is now on the third iteration of the Bren platform, having gone from the original 805 to the much-improved Bren 2 and now a collection of less obvious changes to create the Bren 3. Thes...

CZ has just released their new P09 Nocturne pistols, an update to the previous P07/P09 pairing. These guns fundamentally go back to the classic CZ-75. While that was (and still is) a very popular design, military and police tenders more recently have required more modern elements. So in 2007 the ...

CZ's Bren 2 is one of the more successful recently developed military service rifles, having been adopted by the Czech Republic and Hungary, as well as entering licensed production in Ukraine. The semiauto Bren 2 MS is a fine rifle on its own merits, but also offers an opportunity to build a near...

The vz.50 pistol was a compact .32 ACP (7.65mm Browning) double action pocket pistol used by police forces. It was given a face lift and redesigned the vz.70, and there were plans at one point to further modernize it. The new design would have been the vz.80, but only a few prototypes were made -...

Courtesy of CZ and their reference library, we are looking at a prototype model of the vz.70 pistol intended to use a suppressor. It has an extended and threaded (with interrupted threads for quick attach/detach) barrel, and a mechanism to allow for locking the slide. This will prevent the slide ...

Yesterday we took a look at the vz.52/57 rifle in 7.62x39mm, and today I have one of it's 7.62x45mm predecessors out at the range. Not so much to do some shooting, as it turns out, but to fix malfunctions and wait for hangfires and duds...

However, we did have enough success to put some 7.62x45m...

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, CZ started exploring more commercial export options for its guns. In addition to resurrecting (well, attempting to) the vz.64 Skorpion in 9x19mm, they also developed a selective fire version of their landmark CZ-75 pistol. Production began in 1995,...