The British entered World War One with a technically excellent rifle, with lots of bells and whistles. By 1916, the war was taking a previously unimaginable toll on the industrial capacity of the Empire and rifle production had to be economized. This led to the adoption of the MkIII* pattern of t...

Matt Haught joins me one more time to try out some practical testing of the Diverter and Duckbill shotgun chokes. We are using a 2-liter bottles of seltzer water on strings at 10 yards, and testing the A&W Diverter and Duckbill, using a standard cylinder bore riot gun as a control. So, it's not r...

The kp/31, aka M31 "Suomi" submachine gun was adopted by the Finnish Army in 1931. It was produced by the Tikkakoski company (more commonly known today as Tikka), and in addition to Finnish military contracts they were eager for international sales, either commercial or military. To that end, the...

Prior to the Winter War, Finland had just a few armored vehicles; mostly armored cars. These needed some armament, and one idea put forth was to fit an m/31 Suomi to a ball mount inside a vehicle. This required simply designing a specific shroud for the barrel to fit the mount (as well as the pis...

This revolver is a bit of a mystery. It is a Gasser-produced, Montengrin pattern model 1874, but it has been converted to use rimfire cartridges - and the specific caliber of rimfire cartridge is unclear. This specific example was proofed in Vienna in 1905, making it a very late-production exampl...

Having spent quite a long time yesterday exploring the origins of the Stemple/BRP STG-76, I figured I should take it out to the range. So, let's see what sort of groups I can make with a bipod-mounted open bolt 9mm...

Introduced in 1925 as a major change to the target pistol market, the Straight Line Target used an automatic-style straight grip instead of the traditional revolver frame. S&W had been a market leader in this sort of single shot competition .22 pistol, but was under pressure from the popular new...

The standard Canadian sniper's rifle of World War One was the MkIII Ross fitted with a Warner & Swasey "musket sight" purchased from the United States. However, armorers in the field did create sniping rifles using other scopes - in particular the Winchester A5. The A5 was a popular commercial ri...

The STG-M1A certainly looks and feels like a Thompson, but does it shoot like a Thompson? Let's find out!

The Ross MkII (aka Ross 1905) was a reasonably successful rifle design, but it lacked a few elements that the Canadian military would have preferred. Most significantly, it was not compatible with the charger clip that was introduced for the Lee Enfield rifles in 1907. The rifle we have today is ...

Yesterday we took a look at the Stemple-Suomi on the bench - today it's time to find how similar it is in handling to the real thing! I have a Danish M41 Suomi, a Stemple-Suomi, and a couple of 71-round drums all ready to go...

The result? The Stemple pattern is virtually indistinguishable fro...

Today's video is the Stemple STG-34k at the range...but if I'm going to be honest, it was mostly just an excuse for me to try it out for fun. :) It's definitely the least practical version of the Stemple, but still the coolest looking one.

My interview with Christian Prouteau focused on the MR-73 revolver and how his men in GIGN trained with it. However, I did also ask him about the FR-F1 rifles, and figured I would separate that brief conversation out since it was on a different subject. Specifically, I asked why the FR-F1 used su...

There were many different versions of the Ross straight-pull bolt action rifle made and adopted by the Canadian military. However, the version that Sir Charles Ross thought would be best was only ever made as a small run of prototypes. this rifle was called the Military Match M10, in .280 Ross ca...

Standard Arms was an early (circa 1909) manufacturer of self-loading hunting rifles in the US. The made the Model G, a rifle which could function either as a self-loader or a pump action manual repeater. Unfortunately, is was tremendously unreliable and prone to breakage. In an effort to salvage ...

I really don't know if this sort of format will be interesting to anyone, but I figured I might as well record it and see what you think. This is about 40 minutes of me cleaning up the Laugo Alien after its dust test, rambling about the gun and the testing as I do. Plus intermittent silent gaps w...

Before Samuel Colt popularized the mechanical connection between the revolver hammer and cylinder, the revolvers being made were manually operated. This example is a copy of a third type Collier (that is to say, a gun made originally for percussion caps). After firing, one pulls the cylinder back...

Lionfish are a scourge on reef habitats in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Gulf of Mexico from the eastern coast of South American as far north as New York. They are a species native to the Indian Ocean and Polynesia, and in their native habitat they have competition and predators, and exist as a ba...

How does full automatic effect a gun's time on the PCC Cours of Fire? Well, let's find out with a Lage Max31A Mk2 on a M11A1. I've got a red dot optic on the gun to simplify aiming, and so the question is how semiauto compares to bursts.

My hypothesis was that automatic fire would offer no rea...

An American entrepreneur named Bob Imel found the Sterling SMG particularly interesting, and wanted to import them into the United States. He reached out to Sterling in 1967, but was unable to work out a deal before the 1968 Gun Control Act prohibited importation of machine guns. So instead, Imel...

In July of 1918, the British military formally adopted a Parker-Hale system of adapting .303-caliber arms to .22 rimfire for short range training. The system involved lining standard barrels with .22 caliber blanks that were machined with full size .303 chambers. Special cartridge inserts were us...

William Dodge and his brother were inventors in Washington DC who in the 1870s patented a bunch of different improvements to the Remington Rolling Block, among other guns. This particular one I cannot identify with a specific patent, but to my eye it is a way to give the Rolling Block system a sa...

Today we are taking an original Sten MkII(S) out to the range - something I am excited to be able to do! The suppressor on this Sten is all original, and about 80 years old...and I'm very curious to see how effective it really is.