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Want early access to our videos and be entered to win a monthly raffle?! Considering giving to our Patreon. Link below! https://www.patreon.com/legacycollectibles Check out our Podcast "Flak & Fubar" https://flakfubar.buzzsprout.com/ Legacy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/legacy_collectibles...

Want early access to our videos and be entered to win a monthly raffle?! Considering giving to our Patreon. Link below! https://www.patreon.com/legacycollectibles Check out our Podcast "Flak & Fubar" https://flakfubar.buzzsprout.com/ Legacy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/legacy_collectibles...

Want early access to our videos and be entered to win a monthly raffle?! Considering giving to our Patreon. Link below! https://www.patreon.com/legacycollectibles Check out our Podcast "Flak & Fubar" https://flakfubar.buzzsprout.com/ Legacy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/legacy_collectibles...

The Sturmgewehr was the result of a German intermediate cartridge development program that began in the mid-1930s. It was sidelined for a period as the focus of German Ordnance shifted to full-power rifles in 8x57mm with telescopic sights, but as the German fighting in Russia became more desperat...

The MP-43 (which is mechanically identical to the MP-44 and StG-44; the differences are the subject for another video later) is a tilting bolt rifle with a long stroke gas piston. It was manufactured primarily from complex sheet steel stampings, as a way to minimize the amount of high-quality and...

Valmet designed the M78 hoping to sell it to the Finnish military as an equivalent to the RPK, but it was not adopted. Instead, they were old a semiautos on the commercial market. Because this was before 1986, new machine guns could still be registered in the US. While the guns were all imported ...

The German FG-42 paratroop rifle was a very impressive design, managing to meet a very strict set of performance criteria. The first production model in particular was exceptionally light and compact, while still offering semi and full-auto 8mm Mauser fire with surprisingly light recoil. The gun ...

Only a few dozen of these are in private hands in the US, and they are an extremely advanced design for WWII.

The MKb-42(H), or Maschinenkarabiner-42 (Haenel), was the first production iteration of the German Sturmgewehr. It was chambered for the then-new 8x33mm kurz cartridge, and fired both semiauto and full-auto from an open bolt. Approximately 11,000 of these were made before production changed to th...

The SPIW program began in 1962 with entries from Colt, Springfield, AAI, and Winchester. The first set of trials were a complete failure, and both Colt and Winchester abandoned the project at that point. AAI pressed on, producing these second generation rifles - one for trials in 1966 and one aft...

The AR-15 rifle was originally developed by Armalite as an offshoot of the AR-10 rifle designed by Eugene Stoner. How that second-thought rifle became the US standard military rifle - and the longest-serving infantry rifle in US military history - is a winding story. From Armalite's sale fo the d...

(Unfortunately, Tombstone Territorial Firearms has closed up shop since this video was published).

I had a chance to do a video on a Portuguese contract AR-10 made by Artillerie Inrichtingen in the Netherlands a little while back. Unfortunately, it had just sold, and so we didn't have an oppo...

The CETME-L was Spain's replacement for the CETME Modelo C, which was the 7.62x51mm rifle that was essentially adopted by Germany as the G3 in the 1950s. By the 1980s Spain needed to move to the new NATO standard caliber, 5.56x45mm. A domestic design was preferred, so rather than but HK-93 rifles...

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...

The FN FNC carbine was developed for military trials in the 70s and 80s, and saw some limited success.

We had the opportunity to disassemble and reassemble a Russian Fedorov rifle. The footage is a bit on the dull side, but I don't know when we'll have a chance to recreate it, so I edited this video together for the time being.

I offer our Facebook fans the choice of which video they would like to see today, and the result was overwhelmingly the British EM2 rifle. These were made in both .280/30 and 7.62 NATO calibers, and the one we had the chance to play with was in 7.62. I apologize in advance for the brief amount o...

Ruger introduced their semiauto Mini-14 rifle in 1973, and followed it in 1979 with the AC-556, a select-fire version intended for military and police sales. Offered with either an 18.5 inch barrel and solid wood stock or a 13 inch barrel and side folder, the AC-556 incorporated a selector switch...

Yesterday we took a look at the internals of Ruger's select-fire AC-556, and today we have it out at the range. The main question for me was, how does it compare to the M16/AR-15? And the answer is, not all that well. The AR is definitely a softer shooting platform in full auto. The AC-556, despi...

The M78 was Valmet’s RPK-style heavy barreled squad support weapon pattern of the Finnish AK. It was initially developed as the M74 cavalry machine gun for Finnish military service, but never adopted. Instead, that experimental design would serve as the basis for the commercial export M78 (using ...

The San Cristobal armory was a surprisingly large-scale arms manufacturer set up in the Dominican Republic in the late 40s. They produced several different weapons, but the most common was the Model 2 Cristobal carbine. Designed by Pál Király, it was a lever-delayed blowback mechanism chambered f...

The British Sterling firm designed the SAR-80 (specifically, their engineer Frank Waters) as a very simple rifle to sell to countries outside the main NATO/Warsaw spheres of influence. Sterling ended up getting a license to produce the AR-18 though, and didn't put Water's design into production. ...

When the Slovenian Army decided to adopt a new infantry rifle in the mid-2000s, the Arex Defense company decided to submit the F-2000 into the trials. The H&K G36 was widely expected to be the winner, but Arex had already been involved in making F2000 parts as a subcontractor for FN, and wanted a...