From the Authors: http://www.lugerlp08.com
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The new book on Paul Mauser from Mauro Baudino and Gerben van Vlimmeren is an excellent exploration through the labyrinthine corners of the Mauser Archives. Written with an assumption that the audience will already...

Here in the United States, the Italian Vetterli is overwhelmingly found in the 1870/87/15 guise, and considered unsafe to shoot. However, this is simply the final transformation of a rifle which saw substantial military service and deserves more respect than the often-haggard examples here usuall...

If I had to choose just one firearms book to keep (for some inexplicable reason), Edward Ezell's "Handguns of the World" would be on the short list of books to consider. It is a remarkable combination of history and mechanics, or the most common and the most obscure, and extensive detail at a ba...

Deadly Beauties is a photographic collection of rare and collectible German pistols from 1871 through 1945, split into two volumes. The written sections are quite brief, and the photography is beautiful. More importantly, the photography was well directed by the authors, focusing on the details o...

Get a copy for yourself here: http://www.sipublicaties.nl/

"Captured Arms (Beutewaffen)" by Guus de Vries is Volume 9 of the Propaganda Photo Series by SI Publicaties out of the Netherlands. I really like the whole series, as they do a very good job of combining really interesting original pho...

The BESAL is a simplified redesign of the Bren light machine gun, developed by a BSA employee named Faulkner. The design of the gun was motivated by the disastrous retreat of the British Army from Dunkirk in 1940, where they abandoned a huge amount of weaponry and war material, including most of ...

The Swiss were the first country to adopt a self-loading service pistol; the Luger in 1900. They would keep those in service clear through World War 2, at which point they began seriously looking for a more economical and more modern replacement. During the 1940s, a number of experimental designs...

In 1940, Switzerland began a series of trials to replace their Luger service pistols with something equally high quality, but more economical. They had squeezed as much simplification out of the Luger as they could in 1929, and by this time the guns just needed to be replaced. The first 1940 tria...

Another pair of transitional Bergmann transitional prototypes today, this time ones that sit between the 1896 and 1897 designs (No2/3/4 and No5). One of these is basically an 1896 frame with an 1897 upper assembly and locking system, while the other is basically an 1896 action with an 1897 grip f...

Today we have a pair of interesting transitional Bergman factory prototypes which fall between the early No.1 / 1894 design and the 1896 No2/3/4 commercial production guns. These are both in the white, and show features from the designs both before and after. An interesting look inside the develo...

The Bergmann #5 was the first pistol in the Bergmann line to have a locked breech action, taken from one of Schmeisser's machine gun patents. This model was introduced in 1897 using a more powerful cartridge than any of the previous Bergmanns, with the intention of finding military contracts. The...

Of the three calibers available in the 1896 model Bergmann pistol, the 6.5mm No.3 was the most popular. Approximately 4,000 of these guns were produced, and they found a worldwide following. The No.3 pistol was pretty much identical in concept to the 5mm No.2 Bergmann, but scaled up for the sligh...

The No.2 was Bergmann's first offering of a civilian pocket pistol, introduced in 1896 alongside the larger-framed No.3 and No.4 pistols. It was chambered for a truly anemic 5mm cartridge, using a simple blowback system simplified from the first Bergmann-Schmeisser design. It used a 5-round Mannl...

The initial patent for what would become the Bergmann pistols was actually a delayed blowback mechanism, and it was quickly revised to simple blowback by Louis Schmeisser. The first actual production pistols, designated the No.1, used this plain blowback system.

This initial Bergmann-Schmeisse...

The military breakthrough for Bergmann finally came in 1903 with a new locking system for the pistol, designed by Louis Schmeisser (who had also designed the previous Bergmann handguns). In 1901, Schmeisser developed the new lock, and it was patented by Bergmann (his employer) primarily for use o...

Theodore Bergmann, despite having his name on a lot of different guns, was not actually a gun designer. Bergmann was a financier and industrialist, in many ways like Eli Whitney in the US decades earlier. Bergmann, like Whitney, would provide the capital to develop patents for their inventors.

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Today we are taking a brief side trip in Bergmann development to look at a couple of magnificent engraved Bergmann pistols - specifically, a pair of model 1896 No.3s, a Bergmann Mars 1903, and a model 1910. One of these (the 1910) was done by an outside engraver, and the others are examples of Be...

This was, as far as I can tell, the final iteration of the Bergmann pistols, developed by AEP in Liege for potential military contracts. It retains the locking system of the 1910 pattern pistol, but with a simplified disassembly method reminiscent of the C96 Mauser. The barrel was lengthened, the...

By the time Bergmann found a production subcontractor in AEP for the Spanish order of 1903 Bergmann pistol, the Spanish had added a few new changes to their order, which became known as the Model 1908. In addition to filling the Spanish production, AEP also sold the guns on the commercial market ...

The AN-94 Nikonov is one of the recent series of innovative new small arms coming out of the Russian Federation. In this case, it is an attempt to increase hit probability by firing two rounds before the recoil impulse changes the shooter's point of aim - similar to some of the US SPIW project ex...

Astute audience members will have noted that I described the "1903 Springfield Stripped for Air Service" as being intended as a pilot's survival weapon, because it would be a laughably poor gun to actually use from the cockpit in flight. In his very recent 1903 Springfield episode, Othais of C&Rs...

The "Modifié 1916" update to the Berthier system of rifles and carbines marked a major improvement in the guns combat effectiveness - really the first substantial overhaul to the design since it was developed in 1890. The two main elements of the upgrade were the addition of an upper handguard an...

When World War One broke out in 1914, France mobilized millions of men into military service - and it became abundantly clear that a lot of new rifles would need to be manufactured. The 1886 Lebel was no longer in production and was a slow rifle to make in any case - but the 1907 Colonial Berthie...

The sharpshooters of the French colonial forces in Indochina (the Tirailleurs Indochinois) had never been issued Lebel rifles, and were still using single shot Gras rifles at the turn of the century. The Indochinese soldiers were rather short statured, and the Lebel was simply too long of a rifle...