In 1942, the British government instituted a development program to design a new simplified rifle to replace the No4 MkI Lee Enfield. The CSAD (Central Small Arms Department) came up with a design using a quite simple receiver machined form a small steel billet. It was a rifle wholly distinct for...

This is a Model 1923 Thompson Autoloading Rifle, one of a batch of 20 made by Colt for US military testing in 1924. The system is designed on the same basic Blish principle as the Thompsons submachine gun; the idea that two sliding surfaces will lock solidly together under enough pressure, and no...

In 1943, experimentation began in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia into developing a shortened and lightened version of the Lee Enfield rifle. In Australia, the work was done on the No1 Mk3* rifle, as the Lithgow Arsenal had never switched over to production of the No4 rifle.

We have thre...

In 1943 the need for a lighter and handier version of the Lee Enfield rifle became clear throughout the British Commonwealth, and experimentation began in Canada, Britain, and Australia. The work in Britain would culminate in the No5 Mk1 rifle, but the Canadian arsenal at Long Branch would try so...

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...

Today we are looking at the Winchester company's entry into the 1964 SPIW (Special Purpose Infantry Weapon) trials. The SPIW program was an attempt to increase small arms lethality by increasing hit probability with ideas like hyper-velocity flechette cartridges and burst fire trigger mechanisms....

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...

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 ...

Basically nothing is known about this rifle in terms of who created it or when - but it is a pretty interesting example of an attempt to convert a bolt action rifle to semiautomatic. This rifle began life as a standard Dutch Mannlicher rifle. The conversion was done here be splicing a Lewis Gun g...

The SIG 210, aka the P49, was a magnificent pistol, but really too expensive for a modern military sidearm. In the 1960s, the Swiss military began looking for a new service sidearm that would be a bit less costly, and SIG developed the 220 in response, which would ultimately be adopted as the P75...

Today we are looking at a pair of Steyr 1893 trials revolvers. Only about 100 of these were made, primarily for Austro-Hungarian military trials. These two are early pattern examples, with Pieper-type gas seal systems in which the cylinder is cammed forward upon firing and an extra-long cartridge...

The US Army ACR (Advanced Combat Rifle) program was an effort to find a new type of infantry rifle which could increase the practical accuracy of the M16 by a whopping 100% in the early 1990s. Building on a legacy of similar programs like SALVO and SPIW, the basic idea being tried were extremely ...

Today we are looking at a unique military trials Steyr-Hahn M1911 pistol which has been fitted with an adjustable tangent rear sight. The standard model of the Steyr-Hahn has a fixed rear notch, but it seems that a potential client requested (or Steyr anticipated that someone would request) and a...

After the Mp44/StG44 Sturmgewehr was starting to see substantial production and field use, the German military and the Mauser company began working on a way to simplify production of the weapon. The design for the Gerät 06H actually began with the Gerät 03, an attempt to make a roller-locked G43 ...

In 1943, the British government began a program to develop a shortened and lightened version of the No1 SMLE rifle, for production in India and Australia - where the national ordnance factories had not converted to production of the No4 rifle. This prototype is the first pattern produced by the I...

Robert Roy was a career Colt employee, who began his work as an engineer in 1963 (including work on the 1971/SSP pistols and the CMG machine gun series) and retired in 1993 as Director of International Sales. One of his side projects appears to have been experimentation into auto-ejecting revolve...

Production of the Colt Pocket Hammerless (aka the Model M) pretty much died at the end of World War Two. Military contracts ended, and the civilian market was quite weak - Colt shipped just 132 of the .32 caliber guns between 1946 and 1953, and only a handful of .380s at the same time. Several pr...

While Harrington & Richardson was making M14 rifles for the United States military, they were also experimenting with other variations on the design. Among these was the “Guerrilla Gun”, an shortened and lightened M14. The barrel was reduced in length by 4.5 inches and also reduced significantly ...

Gustloff was a large industrial concern in Germany which made many different weapons for the military. In addition to these, its attempted to market a small-caliber pistol for police or SS use. This pistol used an alloy frame (with steel inserts for durability in crucial areas) and steel slide, w...

The Winchester G30R is the final iteration of David Marshall Williams' work on a full power .30 caliber military rifle. The project began with a design by Ed Browning (John Browning's half brother) using a tilting bolt an annular gas piston, manufactured for US military trials by Colt. It moved t...

I have gotten quite a lot of questions about this experimental Austrian 1915 machine gun or submachine gun since it was included in the Battlefield One computer game. Unfortunately, the sum total of information we have on this weapon is three photographs found in an Austrian archive. Extrapolatin...

August Coenders was an independent arms designer in Germany. During the 1930s he spent several years working in England and at the French Puteaux Arsenal, which contributed to a general lack of trust and interest in his designs by the German high command (the man's generally adversarial nature di...

Thanks to the generosity of a collector in the Association of Maltese Arms Collectors and Shooters, we have a chance today to take a look at a pre-production FG-42, serial number 015. This is one of the guns manufactured by Rheinmetall (the series production would be handed over to Krieghoff) in ...

Charles Clement is best known for a series of civilian pocket pistol made in the years before World War One, but today we are looking at a prototype Clement military pistol from 1914. This gun retains most of the same mechanical features of Clement's pocket guns, but is scaled up to the 9x20mm Br...