The H&K Model 4 was named for the fact that it was offered in four different calibers - .22LR, .25 ACP, .32 ACP, and .380 ACP. The gun came with a complete set of spare barrels and magazines to allow conversion between all of them, and interesting feature not offered by any other pistols like it ...

Patented by Austin H. Freeman in 1862, 2000 of these revolvers were manufactured by Hoard’s Armory in Watertown New York in 1863 and 1864. None were purchased by the Federal government, but they were sold to states and private individuals, and saw use in the Civil War. Freeman’s patent was for an...

Duck’s foot pistols are one of the iconic classic “weird gun” categories. The one exemplifies the typical pattern, with four barrels arranged in a wedge, fired simultaneously with a single flintlock action. Traditionally, these are attributed to people like prison wardens and ships’ captains, who...

Johann Nicolaus Dreyse, later promoted to the aristocracy as Nicolaus von Dreyse, designed the first mainstream military breechloading rifle. His rifle was adopted by Prussia and changed military history, but this was not his only work. Dreyse also endeavored to sell guns commercially, both rifle...

Made by the Cummings Gun Works of Boston late in World War One, this is a pseudo-firearm training device for teaching some aspects of marksmanship without the safety hazard of bullets actually flying around. This one appears to be intended to teach shooters to hold the rifle perfectly vertical. E...

The Jameson Raid in December 1895 was one of the key events in the lead to the second Boer War. Leander Jameson took a force of about 600 men on December 1895 to make a surprise attach on Johannesburg, incite support form the multitude of British miners who felt oppressed by the Boer government, ...

Patented by Kiel V. Barnekov of New York in 1870, this is a toggle-locked, single shot, open bolt rifle. It was entered into the US 1872 rifle trials which would ultimately select the Allin “Trapdoor” conversion of the Springfield as the next US serve rifle.

Barnekov’s design was intended to b...

Today we are looking at the results from the Rock Island May 2019 sale to see what happened with the guns that I featured in videos over the last few weeks.

The Whitney Wolverine was a .22LR semiauto pistol designed by Robert Hillberg in 1954. It is a very distinctive looking gun, with the nickeled versions in particular being the epitome of Atomic Age styling. Unfortunately, the gun was a commercial failure, and only 13,371 were made in total by two...

Walther was founded as a rifle making company in the 1880s, and expanded into the flourishing market for semiautomatic pocket pistols around 1910. The Model 3 was the company’s first .32 ACP caliber pistol, and was a very small gun. With a 6-round capacity it offered one round more than the Piepe...

This surprising derringer was commissioned in the 1970s by Walther Buhl Ford III for his wife Bobbie Ford, and hand crafted by Alvin White, Colt’s renowned master engraver. Bobbie Ford was a collector of Western curiosa and particularly enjoyed brothel memorabilia - so that was the theme used by ...

The Springfield Arms Company existed only for a brief period in 1850 and 1851, making revolvers designed by its chief engineer, James Warner, before being driven out of business by Colt patent lawyers. During that time, Springfield (no relation to the arsenal) made a variety of models in .28, .31...

The Mauser 98 may have been the best bolt action design of all time, but it did not spring forth from Paul Mauser’s head fully formed. The Mauser took nearly 10 years of development and iteration to reach its full potential, and the 1892 pattern Spanish Mauser we are looking at today is one of th...

Louis Schlegemilch had been one of the contributors to the Gewehr 1888 and when the German military decided to replace it, Schlegemilch was there with a design he hoped would win. His model 1896 rifle was a two lug bolt action design with a number of clever machining details, and a distinctive ma...

The MG13 was an interim machine gun used by the German military in the 1930s until the MG34 was adopted and widely issued. The MG13 (so designated to allow a claim that it was a WW1 era design, not a new development by Rheinmetall in the 1920s) was a closed-bolt, magazine fed, short recoil, hamme...

When the Belgian military decided to adopt a new rifle in the late 1880s, they attached a wide variety of competitors. The best of the batch were Mauser and Mannlicher, with Mauser ultimately winning - but among the other entrants was Belgian Captain Uldarique Marga and his bolt action rifle desi...

Between 1909 and 1915, the huge French mail-order firm of Manufacture Francais d’Armes et Cycles de St Etienne (later called Manufrance) sold Luger pistols (as well as many other types of firearms). They were enough of a substantial customer that DWM was willing to roll-mark their pistol barrels ...

In 1947, Yugoslavia received about 4600 Russian M91/30 PU sniper rifles as military aid, which were basically not used, as Yugoslavia had standardized on the 8mm Mauser cartridge. In 1952, however, a new sniper rifle was requested and the 91/30s were put to use. The Zastava factory took 4,618 M48...

In November of 1950, the US Ordnance Department requested an improved version of the Browning 1919 air cooled machine gun for use in tanks. The new version was to be able to feed from either the left or right, a feature which was unimportant for an infantry gun but much more relevant when mountin...

This is a handmade, single shot needle fire pistol (zündnadelpistole) made by a German gunsmith named A. Knoch in Munich in 1850. I have been unable to find any documentation about the man, but the gun is an interested example of the needle fire system that existed as one of the intermediate tech...

Benjamin Joslyn patented this .44 caliber, 5 shot, side-hammer revolver in 1858. He initially contracted with one W.C. Freeman to act as manufacturer and sales agent, but Freeman was unable to actually fulfill the first 500-unit order received from the US military. The contract was cancelled, Jos...

Heinrich Genhart was a Swiss designer working in Liege, Belgium in the 1850s making horizontal turret rifles. His design was actually pretty decent, and included recessed chamber mouths and a calming barrel which would lock more or less solidly into each chamber for firing, thus minimizing cylind...

The Forehand & Wadsworth company was a better firearms manufacturer than most people tend to give them credit for. It evolved from Allen & Wheelock, with Sullivan Forehand and Henry Wadsworth both having married daughters of Ethan Allen. When Wheelock died in 1863, the two were made partners in t...

In 1927, a Berlin resident named Richard Kulisch patented a .22 rimfire conversion kit for the Luger pistol. Kulisch’s conversion used a magazine and fired semiautomatically, which made it a much more practical conversion for military and police training than the 4mm single shot conversions than ...