During the 1930s, there was interest in Finland in replacing the Maxim heavy machine gun with something handier and more mobile. There were experiments with large drum magazines for the LS-26 light machine gun, but these were not satisfactory. Aimo Lahti began to work on a gas-operated GPMG, but ...

A decent number of C96 Mauser pistols were present in Finland's civil war, many of them coming into the country with the Finnish Jaegers, and others from a variety of sources, commercial and Russian. They were used by both the Reds and the Whites, and in both 9x19mm and 7.63x25mm. After the end o...

No blank-firing adapter? No money for practice ammo? What you need is a wooden clicky-clacky noisemaker that locks into your Suomi!

Watch latest videos, sometimes even early releases! Sign up for the newsletter: http://eepurl.com/hkbJYn [or] slateblackindustries (dot) com 👉 Newsletter *The Finnish Veterans Day/ kansallinen veteraanipäivä is April 27th, let us learn about the Finnish soldier in remembrance of the tales told!* ...

Toni of Ensio Firearms made this unique rifle as his final project at gunsmithing school. It's a scratch-built, one-off 7.62x39 AR-15 type rifle with a 4 lug bolt, annular piston like a Vz.52, and it takes AK47 magazines that just slide in and out of the magazine housing like butter.

It turns out that designing a rifle from scratch is hard. Very hard. Which is why most manufacturers don't bother and just make variations on well-established designs like the AR-15, AK, FN FAL or similar.

Ensio Firearms of Finland decided to break the mold and design their own .308 Win / .223 R...

Finland found itself with nearly 200,000 Mosin Nagant rifles in its possession after breaking away from Russian rule in 1917, and those rifles would for the basis of Finnish infantry arms until the adopted of a semiautomatic rifle many decades later.

At first, Russian rifles were simply refurb...

The m/44 pistol was intended to be a lower-cost replacement for the Lahti L35 pistol for the Finnish Defense Forces, but production delays resulted in the first batch of 25 examples not being completed until after the end of the Continuation War. Treaties limited Finland's right to conduct arms d...

When Finland took its independence, the most common type of firearms in the country was the Mosin Nagant - and the second most common was the Arisaka. An assortment of Type 30, Type 35, and Type 38 Arisaka rifles and carbines were left to the Finns by former Russian occupying soldiers. Where did ...

The Lahti L39 was the Finnish answer to the need for an anti-tank rifle, developed just before the Winter War. The rifle was created by noted Finnish designed Aimo Lahti, who had pressed for it to use a 13.2mm cartridge. However, arguments for using a 20x138B cartridge won out, based on hopes to ...

Valmet designed the M78 hoping to sell it to the Finnish military as an equivalent to the RPK, but it was not adopted. Instead, they were old a semiautos on the commercial market. Because this was before 1986, new machine guns could still be registered in the US. While the guns were all imported ...

The Swedish Bofors company developed a sophisticated and very high-quality light anti-tank gun in the early 1930s, and found significant commercial success with it. A variety of countries either purchased the guns outright from Bofors or paid for licenses to produce them domestically. These count...

My first experience shooting a Lahti AT gun. Just using it as a single shot; no magazine and the gas system turned off. It kicks like a mule! The skis allow it to slide back on recoil, and push me right along with it. The Solothurn S18/1000 is a much nicer gun...but also much more expensive to buy.

The Jatimatic was a Finnish submachine gun intended for bodyguards and private security forces. It was designed in the 1980s, and never achieved much success despite having some interesting and clever features. The bolt is designed like and Uzi or CZ-23/24 bolt, wrapping around the barrel to allo...

The M78 was Valmet’s RPK-style heavy barreled squad support weapon pattern of the Finnish AK. It was initially developed as the M74 cavalry machine gun for Finnish military service, but never adopted. Instead, that experimental design would serve as the basis for the commercial export M78 (using ...

Finnish Brutality 2021 is going to be a tough match in the best case. But I will be running it in a 1940 uniform, with a Mosin. A Finnish M39 Mosin, sure, but still a Mosin. That means that I have a lot of things already working against me, and the last thing I want is to have the rifle not shoot...

In light of the approaching Finnish Brutality: The Winter War match, I though we could take a look at the two rifles associated with the world's most successful sniper: Simo Häyhä. Häyhä was born in 1905, joined the Civil Guard at the age of 17, and did his mandatory military service from 1925 to...

While in Finland for Finnish Brutality 2021, the question naturally arose of how bolt action rifles would fare in the snow. Bloke and Chap from Bloke on the Range decided to find out, and peer-pressured me into doing the same thing with my M39 Finnish Mosin. Thanks to Sako for sponsoring the matc...

After the failure of the domestic production Ahlberg pistols and some disappointment with the performance of surplus French Ruby pistols, the Finnish military turned to DWM in Germany for a main service pistol in 1922. The core of the Finnish armed forces had been exposed to the Luger as Jaegers ...

In the wake of Finland gaining its independence, small arms were much in demand for the armed forces. Many rifles had been taken from Russian stockpiles in Finland, but not many handguns. Hugo Ahlberg ran Ab H. Ahlberg & Co Oy, a machining company in Turku and he decided that making guns for the ...

The Finns developed several difference scopes rifles in the 1930s, but none were made in large quantities, and they were not really much used during the Winter War or Continuation War. The first post-war consideration was given to a new model in 1954, but that led instead to a decision to make a ...

Carl Pelo was a an engineer with Sako in the 1930s, and developed a series of self-loading rifles. He used a short recoil mechanism with a pair of locking flaps on the bolt, much like the Degtyarev machine guns from the Soviet Union. Pelo attempted to market his design both to the Finnish armed f...

We were going to have a couple serious military vehicles as range props for Finnish Brutality back in February, but with the match postponed because of covid restrictions that didn't come to pass. However, Jari (CEO of Varusteleka) and I were not going to let that stop us from having a bit of fun...

Finland's standard light machine gun going into the Winter War was the LS-26, a gun which did not succeed in field use. It was complex and cumbersome, and Finnish troops quickly replaced it with captured Russian DP-27 LMGs. Part of the problem of the LS-26 was it's recoil-operated design. Finnish...