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Walther VG-1 Presentation Model
We took a look at this rifle with a few photos a while back at ForgottenWeapons, but I do now have some video of it as well - a VG-1 last ditch rifle with an inlaid plaque presented to the Volkssturm leader of the Wartheland district of Poland, one Arthur Grieser (convicted of war crimes and hang...
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Better than the Bren? The Vickers Berthier Light Machine Gun
A close competitor to the famous Bren gun, The Vickers Berthier would ultimately lose out to its better known rival during the 1930s British Light Machine Gun trials. It would go on to see success with Indian troops during the Second World War.
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Using 8x33K Ammo in AK Magazines
The Pakistani "44-Bore" rifle is an AK with the chamber reamed to fit 8x33K ammunition (originally developed for the German StG-44 family of rifles). I wanted to see how different types of AK magazines would behave when loaded with 8x33 cartridges...
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Union Automatic Revolver
The most well-known historic automatic revolver is the British Webley-Fosbery, but there were other handguns of the type that were put into production. One example is the Union auto-revolver, made in Toledo, Ohio shortly before the First World War. While the Webley-Fosbery was intended to be a hi...
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The Australian Owen SMG
The Australian-designed Owen submachine gun is a weapon with quite a story behind it. The Owen is arguably the best subgun used during WWII, and also probably the ugliest. Its mere existence was a drawn out struggle between the inventor and manufacturer and the Australian Army bureaucracy, and ye...
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Swiss ZfK-55 Sniper Rifle
The ZfK-55 is basically a K31 action, with a bunch of modifications to convert it into a very nice marksman's rifle. The more obvious changes are the muzzle brake (very reminiscent of the second model FG-42, which makes sense as the Swiss experimented with those rifle quite a bit after the war), ...
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Streetsweeper Shotgun
It may seem sometimes that I've never met a gun I didn't like...but I can assure you that isn't the case. The Streetsweeper, for example, is a pretty terrible gun.
Originally designed in 1983 by a Rhodesian man named Hilton Walker, the Striker shotgun was refined and manufactured in South Afri...
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Shooting the Singapore Technologies SAR-21
We lucked into a chance to disassemble and shoot a pretty rare black rifle recently - an SAR-21 bullpup made by Singapore Technologies (and this is why we take a camera everywhere we go). Singapore is another one of those countries with an impressive arms industry that most folks don't know about...
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Shooting Elmer Keith's Carry Pistol
I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try my own hand at shooting the legendary Elmer Keith's personal carry gun, a Smith & Wesson pre-Model 29 in .44 Magnum. It's a fantastic piece of shooting steel, and was a joy to shoot, even if I couldn't handle it anywhere near like Keith did.
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Shooting a DShK Heavy Machine Gun
We're still working on an extended write-up on the DShK heavy machine gun, but thanks to our friend Leszek in Poland, we have some nice HD video of one firing.
The Russian counterpart to to Browning M2, the DShK uses the same flapper-locking system as the DP and RPD machine guns, and is chambe...
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Shooting a Bren 100-Round Drum
A friend of mine went to a local machine gun shoot recently, and came back with some footage of a pair of Bren guns being fired with a 100-round drum magazine. These drums were designed for anti-aircraft use, and are quite rare today, so it was cool to see one actually in use.
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Schwarzlose 1908 Blow-Forward Pistol
We previously got to take a look at a Hino-Komuro, a Japanese blow-forward automatic pistol dating from 1908 - and today we have another blow-forward from 1908. Andreas Schwarzlose (best known for his 1907 and 07/12 machine guns) designed this pistol for military and civilian use, and it saw mino...
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Savage Model 101 Youth Cowboy "Revolver"
A little nostalgia for today - I was out at the range with some friends, and this came out of a range bag. It's a Savage Model 101, in .22 LR, and I thought it was just too neat not to do a quick little video on (I like things that appear to be one thing but are actually another). Savage introduc...
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Experimental C96 "Joint Safety" Mauser
This particular 1902-made example of the C96 Mauser incorporates several experimental features of the design that would never go into mass production. It was an effort to make a version of the C96 that would be more suitable for civilian carry - something a bit lighter and more compact than the m...
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Savage 1907 in .45ACP at the Range
In the first years of the 20th century, the US military was looking for a new standard sidearm in a .45-caliber cartridge, and set up a series of trials to choose one. The entrants to the 1907 pistol trials included many of the prominent semiauto pistols of the day, like the Parabellum (aka Luger...
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Russian Winchester 1895
Sorry for the breathing you hear in the video - this is the final video we filmed in that session. The fellow running the camera is a disabled vet with serious lung problems who owns this rifle (among others). If I had realized his breathing would be audible I would have used a different mic setu...
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Russian 1895 Nagant Revolver
One of the mechanically interesting guns that is really widely available in the US for a great price (or was until very recently, it seems) is the Russian M1895 Nagant revolver. It was adopted by the Imperial Russian government in 1895 (replacing the Smith & Wesson No.3 as service revolver), and ...
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Roth-Steyr 1907 Pistol
We had the chance to dig into a Roth Steyr 1907 selfloading pistol recently, and put together a video on it. The pistol is quite unusual, with a fixed internal magazine, rotating barrel locking system, and quasi-double action trigger mechanism (actually quite similar to modern striker-fire pistol...
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Reproduction FG-42 by SMG Guns
There has been talk for a while of people making functional reproductions of the German FG-42 paratroop rifle for a long time...and it wasn't just idle talk. We have gotten our hands on a sample of the second model FG-42 being made by SMG out of Texas, with instructions to go nuts, and not baby i...
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Reproduction 1877 "Bulldog" Gatling Gun
Thanks to a friendly collector, we had the chance to take out one of the new, gorgeous reproduction 1877 Gatling guns being sold by Colt. It's a near-exact replica, with the added feature of being able to crank backwards to safely clear any loaded cartridges out of the action. Being a Bulldog mod...
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Myth and Reality of the Ross MkIII Rifle
There is a long-standing urban legend about the Canadian Ross rifle, a straight-pull bolt action that was used in lieu of the SMLE by Canadian troops early in World War One. The story is that the Ross would sometimes malfunction and blow the bolt back into its shooter's face, with pretty horrible...
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Model 1871 Ward-Burton Bolt-Action Rifle
The Model 1871 Ward-Burton was one of the early experimental rifles trialled by the US military in its search for a new breechloading rifle to replace the theoretically-interim Allin conversion that made muzzle-loading rifles into Trapdoor Springfields. Four breechloading cartridge rifles were se...
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MG34 Trigger Group
We spent some time with Greg from Allegheny Arsenal a little while back, and one of the things we went over was disassembly and reassembly of the MG34 trigger group. When you get one in a parts kit, it's often loaded up with cosmoline and needs a thorough cleaning...so here's how to do it.
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Madsen Semiauto LMG
The Madsen light machine gun is note-worthy for several reasons - it was the first military-issue light machine gun developed and it was successful enough to remain in production into the 1950s (long after every WWI-era machine gun was long out of production). It was also one of the most usual ma...