The Vickers-Berthier was initially designed by Andre Berthier in France prior to World War One. It went through a number of substantial design changes before the war, and was actually ordered in quantity by the United States right at the end of WWI - but the order was cancelled with the armistice...

The iconic weapon of the Rhodesian Bush War is the FN-FAL, painted in a distinctive "baby poop" yellow and green pattern. Because Rhodesia was under international embargo, its options for obtaining weapons were limited. Some domestic production was undertaken, but one large source was neighboring...

Today it's time to take the Norinco QBZ-97 - aka Type 97 NSR - out to the range for some shooting! This is the Canadian semiautomatic-only legal version of China's new military rifle, and it is chambered for the 5.56mm NATO cartridge (the Chinese military models use their 5.8x42mm cartridge).

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The Chinese military introduced a new 5.8x42mm cartridge in 1987, and then developed a new bullpup rifle to use it. The rifle was the QBZ Type 95, and it was a bullpup rifle with a rotating bolt and short-stroke gas piston operating system. Shortly thereafter, a commercial export version was rele...

In 1928, the Italian army adopted a rifle-mounted grenade launcher. It was a potentially interesting weapon which wound up being fatally handicapped by the use of ineffective grenades. The basic idea was to mount a second rifle receiver to the side of a Model 91TS carbine, but with an integral gr...

The Timberwolf is a bolt action precision rifle made by Prarie Gun Works of Manitoba, Canada. It was initially made as a commercial rifle in a number of different calibers, and in 2001 it won Canadian trials to become the C14 Timberwolf Medium Range Sniper Weapon System (replacing the C3A1 Parker...

The Colt 1902 Philippine Model revolver is a modified version of the Colt 1878 Double Action Army or Frontier model pistol. This was Colt’s first entry into the large-frame double action revolver market, following just after the 1877 small frame Lightning and Thunderer designs. It was a marginall...

The Lee-Speed rifle we looked at yesterday came with a set of really neat sight protectors, which I think are worth a separate video on their own. Quite a lot of work went into these, for something as simple as a sight protector!

This revolver, designed by Fordyce Beals (how cool of a name is that?), was developed while Colt’s patent on using the hammer to index the cylinder was still in effect. To avoid that patent, this Beals design uses the trigger to rotate and index the cylinder, with the hammer being cocked separate...

At the Fall 2021 meeting of the American Society of Arms Collectors, I had the opportunity to make a presentation on the development of French military repeating rifles. The story begins with the Mle 1874 Gras, and proceeds through three different patterns of tube-magazine Kropatschek type rifles...

The Alofs conversion is a contraption that can be bolted onto the side of a single shot break action shotgun to convert it into a 4+1 capacity repeating action. Patented by Herman Alofs in 1924 (https://patents.google.com/patent/US1507881), it was sold in the mid/late 1920s for $6. Surviving adve...

In the mid 1980s, an Italian designer named Alphonso Giambelli developed a bullpup pistol-caliber carbine with hopes of selling it to Italian law enforcement. That never happened, but the gun was offered on the commercial civil market as the semiauto AGM-1 by a company named Algimech (after ALpho...

Thanks to Jeff Folloder and Airtronics USA, I have a chance today to look at and test-fire a PSRL (Precision Shoulder-fired Rocket Launcher) - in essence, an American-made RPG-7. The rocket we are using here is a Bulgarian-made training round with an inert warhead and live booster and rocket.

Bent Agner Nielsen was a Danish tinkerer born in 1925, who studied art as a young man and worked as a painter. In the 1970s he became interested in firearms, beginning with engraving work. This soon evolved into an interest in mechanical design, and in 1978 he began work on the M80, an Olympic-st...

This is a rifle I have not been able to find any specific documentation about or even reference to - but we can tell what it it, and that's a very interesting story. The rifle is mechanically a Schlegelmilch design, from Louis Schlegelmilch of the Spandau Arsenal in Germany. An earlier 1896 patte...

As practice for Finnish Brutality, I ran a 2-Gun match with the Finnish M39 Mosin Nagant I am planning to use over in Finland. The M39 is the final iteration of the Mosin in Finnish service, and has very good sights, a great trigger, and a nice smooth action (for a Mosin, anyway). I was using PPU...

Finland adopted the AK in 7.62x39mm after World War Two, and continues to use the AK to this day. The standard pattern RK62 was starting to fall a bit short, and so in the late 1980s a program was begun at Valmet to produce a modernized version for the Finnish Defense Forces. Valmet was acquired ...

Britain began the process of replacing its Vickers aircraft machine guns with a new Colt/Browning design in 1935, with its adoption of the Colt MG40. This was essentially John Browning's air cooled M1919 machine gun made smaller and lighter, with an increased rate of fire, and reversible feed dir...

The Beretta Model 38A was one of the very best submachine guns of World War Two. Designed by veteran Beretta engineer Tullio Marengoni (who designed most of Beretta’s pistols as well as the Beretta M1918 SMG and 1918/30 carbine), it was the first Italian weapon to use a cartridge equivalent to 9x...

The "Korsu" is a special version of the Suomi made for use in the bunkers of the Mannerheim Line. When construction on the Line really kicked into high gear in the summer of 1939, is was discovered that the vision slits in the bunkers were too small to fit the muzzle of a standard m/31 Suomi. In ...

In August 1903, Thomas Bennett (head of the Winchester company) wrote a letter to his many distributors and agents explaining how Winchester had decided to part ways with the Browning Brothers, and how the company would certainly be better off as a result. The gun at the heart of the breakup was ...

There are a fairly wide variety of silenced Sten guns that were made during World War Two, because many were needed for small Special Operations Executive missions. However, the British Army did also formally develop and adopt such a weapon. It was initially requested in 1942, with the first tria...

Zastava has been making AK rifles in Serbia (formerly Yugoslavia) since the 1960s, and today has a number of offerings made for the commercial market. One of the recent ones is the M90 (or more specifically, the PAPM90PS). This is a 5.56mm rifle fundamentally based on the M70 pattern. It uses Ser...

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...