Designed by brothers Charles and Sebre Howard and first patented in 1862, this is a single shot lever action produced by the Whitneyville Armory between 1866 and 1870. It is a really neat compact design that is all contained within a tube. The system was made in rifle, sporting rifle, and shotgun...

In the course of researching Chinese domestic pistols of the Warlord Era, I sorted through several hundred examples, and was able to identify six distinct patterns of uniquely Chinese designs. Once of these I have designated the Horn Grip Type, as almost all the examples identified use horn (some...

One of the most popular pistols in Warlord Era China was the FN 1900, a compact and reliable officer's pistol in .32 ACP. The Chinese also found great use for the Mauser C96, but this was seen as a sort of combat carbine, where the FN was more a defensive weapon and status symbol.

Several lar...

The armies of Warlord Era China had quite a fondness for the FN 1900 pistol, but they also made extensive use of the 7.63mm Mauser cartridge. So what would be a more natural choice than to make copies of the FN 1900 in 7.63mm Mauser? We can look past the fast that the FN design (and its Chinese c...

The Czech ZK-383 is a magnificent submachine gun, but sadly very scarce in the United States. So when I saw the semiauto example, I wanted to take it out to the range for some plinking. It has some magazine issues (as one might expect form a one-off semiauto made by a hobbyist here in the US), bu...

I really enjoy the Lewis Gun, and it's been a long time since I had a chance to put some rounds through one. This particular example is a Savage-made gun marked USN, and I think (but can't prove) that it is one of a small number purchased in .303 British caliber for the US Marine Corps. It also h...

Seriously guys, buying trash surplus ammo is false economy. Do the research, don't get tempted by a 2c/round savings, and get ammunition that will actually run. You will have a way better time shooting, and your guns will thank you for it.

The L2A3 Sterling submachine gun was a staple of British and small arms after World War Two, until the L85 rifle was adopted. Designed by George Patchett during the war and produced by Sterling, it is a simple and economical tubular open-bolt, simple blowback gun. It uses a very compact folding s...

Yesterday we looked at the Savage M1918 aircraft version of the Lewis gun, used by American aviators during World War One. Today, we are taking it out to the range along with a very scarce original tripod mounting adapter.

I was not expecting all that much from the gun, but it is really tremen...

This is an interesting single-shot breechloading system built by Kuhn of Besançon - a city near Switzerland in eastern France. It is clearly a sporting rifle, firing an 11mm black powder cartridge and probably dates to the 1870s or 1880s. It automatically ejects an empty case when opened and aut...

John Anderson was a Korean War veteran who became interested in developing a high capacity, selective-fire combat shotgun for military use. He designed what became known as the Pancor Jackhammer, a fully automatic, gas operated, blow forward, drum fed shotgun. Three working examples were made, tw...

As an open-bolt machine gun, the Lewis was not well suited to synchronization on WW1 aircraft - but it was an ideal gun for flexible mounting. To suit this use, a series of aircraft-specific Lewis variations were made. Today, we are looking at a 1918 model made by Savage for the US, chambered in ...

Simson & Co of Suhl was chosen as the sole contractor legally allowed to manufacture and rework military small arms for the German military under the Versailles treaty. They acquired the P08 Luger tooling from the Erfurt arsenal, and began small volume P08 production in 1925. They would product j...

The first US-production military arm was the “US musket, Charleville pattern” - known today as the Model 1795 Springfield Musket. Copied from the French 1766 model Charleville which made up the bulk of existing US arms supplies, this was a .69 caliber smoothbore flintlock with a 44.5 inch (1.13m...

Introduced in 1937, the Type 97 was basically a copy of the ZB 26/30 pattern light machine gun adapted to use in Japanese tanks and armored cars. The adaptations included mounting an optical sight to the left side fo the action, moving the iron sights to the right, and moving the recoil spring to...

When the French occupied the Mauser factory in April 1945, they found all the tooling to produce .22 caliber rifles still in place and in good order (among other things). The French military did not have a proper training rifle at the time, and they decided to have Mauser design and produce one....

In July 1945, just a few months after the first French troops entered Oberndorf, the Mauser factory began assembling guns under French oversight. In addition to HSc pistols, P38 pistols, K98k rifles, and Model 45 training rifles, Mauser also had sufficient stocks of Luger parts to assemble severa...

In 1920, Fritz Mann of Germany patented the idea of cutting a shallow ring in the chamber of a pistol as a delaying mechanism. When fired, a cartridge case would expand into this groove, thus requiring more time and energy to push the case out of the chamber and effectively delaying opening. This...

In the late 1970s and early 80s, Gordon Ingram came close to producing a military rifle in one of the most convoluted international arrangements I’ve yet heard of. Prototypes were made in Italy using British raw castings, to be tested in Somalia as part of a project to build a rifle factory ther...

South Korea experimented with a series of rifle designs in 7.62x51mm in the 1960s and early 1970s, but none of them came close to production. In 1974 a license was acquired from Colt for Daewoo Precision Industries to built the M16A1 for South Korean military use. This was good, but the license d...

Sweden was a remarkably early adopted of the light machine gun, for a nation not involved in World War One. Looking over the designs that existed right after the war, Sweden opted to purchase 700 (technically, 703) commercial BAR automatic rifles from Colt (by way of FN). These were configured to...

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 ...

One of the biggest arsenals in China in the 20th century was the Hanyang Arsenal, built in 1890 by the Qing dynasty to help modernize China’s military. The fist rifle to be made there was a copy of the German Gewehr 88 commission rifle (designated Type 88), which began production in 1895. A few c...

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 ...