Andreas Schwarzlose was a German designer who created several very interesting and unusual handgun designs (in addition to his 1907 heavy machine gun, which was adopted as a standard arm of the Austro-Hungarian military). His first handgun was the model 1898, a short recoil, rotating bolt pistol ...

Josef Laumann was an Austrian designer of early ring-trigger manually repeating pistols, and was one of the first to develop that type of handgun into a semiautomatic. He took an 1891 pattern ring trigger gun and adapted it with an 1892 patent into a simple blowback self-loader - coming very clos...

Savage was very successful with their .32 ACP and .380 ACP pocket pistols, and in the 1910s was interested in also breaking into the .25 ACP market, to compete with the Colt 1908 "Baby Browning". Savage invested in all the tooling to make a new blowback .25, but never put them into serial product...

The Salvator-Dormus has the distinction of being the world’s first semiauto pistol, being patented in 1891. It is chambered for the 8mm Dormus cartridge, and holds 5 rounds in a Mannlicher type clip. Only about 50 of these pistol were made, mostly for an Austrian military trial in 1896/7 (this pa...

In our final segment on the SA80 family of weapons, we are looking at a selection of underbarrel grenade launcher adaptations of the L85 rifle. Specifically, we will see a prototype XL60 series launcher, a prototype Enfield XL70 series system, an adaptation of the Colt M203, and the final adopted...

One of the original design intentions of the SA80 project was to replace the infantry rifle and the submachine gun with a single weapon that could fulfill both roles - hence the choice of a bullpup configuration. This would, theoretically, allow rifle ballistics and also SMG handling and maneuver...

At last, we have reached the L85A2, when the rifle was finally made into something reliable and effective. In 1995, after extensive public scandal from the L85A1's shortcomings being blatantly exposed in the first Gulf War, Heckler & Koch was given a contract to retrofit the rifles. At the time H...

The SA80 saga continues today with the final pre-production versions of the L85A1 and L86A1, although at this point they still both carry XL designations, as they were not yet formally adopted weapons. In these weapons we can see a couple last distinctive mechanical changes, but perhaps more impo...

By 1980, the scheduled deadline for adopting the L85 and L86 was rapidly approaching, and the weapons should have been in the last stages of fine-tuning before production began. This was not the case, however - testing was still uncovering critical problems in the guns.

The goal for these weap...

Once the basic configuration of the new British rifle was determined, the next step was to build a series of prototypes. The design that took form was basically a bullpup copy of the Armalite AR-18. The design team at Enfield were mostly senior draftsmen, with virtually no firearms experience amo...

The British military had been working towards a reduced-power cartridge since the end of World War 2, and the ultimate adoption of the FAL/SLR in 7.62x51mm NATO did not end their interest in the concept. It would not be long before the roots of SA80 would take hold, and today we are looking at th...

The UD-42 was originally the design of Carl "Gus" Swebilius, who was at the time (1940) working for the High Standard company. It failed to attract interest form the US military, but was appealing to the Dutch government for arming their East Indies colonies. A contract for 15,000 guns was signed...

Given the prevalence of muddy horrible trenches in World War 1, why didn't anybody design dust covers to protect the actions of their combat rifles? Well, they actually did... and today we are looking at both French and German examples.

The French model was a very simple contoured sheet metal...

The ZK-391 is one in a series of Czech developmental semiautomatic rifles designed by Josef Koucký. It was developed initially in 1939 (hence the "39" in the designation), and was tested by the Italian military in 1943. It was ultimately not put into production, but nonetheless is an interesting ...

With the advent of the tank in World War One, antitank rifles became a priority for many countries, to provide infantry with some weapon to counter the new armored threat. The best known example of these (and the only one to see significant production before the end of WWI) was the German Tankgew...

In my recent video on the Whitworth rifle, I made a rather embarrassing mistake, interpreting "figure of merit" accuracy measurements as complete group sizes. This was incorrect, and caused me to seriously overestimate the accuracy of the Whitworth. It was indeed a outstandingly accurate rifle, b...

The wheel lock was one of the first types of early gun or firearm, developed as an alternative to the simple but problematic matchlock musket. The wheellock uses an iron pyrite set against a spinning serrated wheel to produce sparks to fire a charge of black powder. The wheel lock was complex and...

Following up yesterday's look at the history and mechanics of the Webley-Fosbery self-cocking revolvers, today we are out at the range to do some shooting with one.

In terms of handling, it is a comfortable gun to shoot, albeit with some exaggerated recoil because of the very high bore axis r...

George Fosbery, V.C., was a decorated British officer with substantial combat experience in India when he decided to design a better sidearm in 1895. True semiautomatic handguns were in their very early stages of development at that time, and Fosbery thought that one could have a more durable, mo...

Following up on yesterday's history and disassembly of the Webley 1913, today I am taking one of them out to the range. Courtesy of Mike Carrick from Arms Heritage magazine, I am shooting original WWI British .455 SL ammunition. We don't have a lot of it to work with here, but we will try out som...

William Whiting and the Webley company had high hopes for their self-loading pistols being adopted by the British military - but they never got the success they were hoping for.

After the poor performance of the Webley 1904 at trials, William Whiting decided to make sure his next attempt woul...

In the early years of the 20th century, before the Great War tempered society's interest in the martial arts, dueling came into the popular vogue. Not the lethal kind, but rather a more sporting style using pistols firing wax balls instead of lead bullets. It was even demonstrated at the 1908 Oly...

The Walther WA-2000 has a reputation of being the ultimate German sniper rifle, with no expense spared in its design and construction. Designed in the aftermath of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, the WA2000 was intended to be a police sniper rifle, not a military arm. It is a bullpup layout an...

The Vickers-Berthier MkIII was adopted by the Indian army in 1933, and served through World War Two and into the 1970s (at least). It is chambered for the standard .303 British cartridge, fires from an open bolt, and uses top-mounted 30-round magazines. I didn't know exactly what to expect when I...