I've been promising this range video for a while now, and here it is. We took all three configurations of the C96 Broomhandle Mauser - a pistol, a carbine, and a machine pistol - out to the range for some comparisons.

We have another video to post today - this time about the Steyr 1912 handgun, aka the Steyr-Hahn.

The Hino-Komuro pistol (sometimes spelled Komura) was developed by a young Japanese inventor named Kumazo Hino, and financed by Tomijiro Komuro in the first decade of the 20th century. The gun uses a virtually unique blow-forward mechanism, which makes it very interesting to study. The rear of th...

Today we have a video for you on a German "Jager" pistol, so named because it was made by the Jager company. Jager was a well-respected maker of high quality sporting arms, having been established in 1901 in Suhl, Germany. With the onset of World War One, Kaiser Wilhelm decreed that all arms manu...

The Radium was the predecessor to the much more well-known (and more successful) Ruby pistol made by Gabilonda y Urresti, which was sold to the French Army by the hundreds of thousands during World War One. The Radium was very unusual in its magazine design, which featured a spring loaded sliding...

The "Hermit Kingdom" of North Korea has a number of somewhat unusual military firearms that are not quite direct copies of anything else, but we very rarely get to see example of them up close. The Type 70 was intended for high-ranking officers, replacing the Type 64 (which was a copy of the Brow...

The Fiala Model 1920 was a manually-operated repeating pistol in .22LR caliber that was marketed with the backing of famed polar explorer Anthony Fiala. The guns came as a set of one frame, three barrels (3", 7.5", and 20") and a removable shoulder stock. This allowed the owner to set the gun up ...

Today's item is an example of the smallest centerfire pistol ever made - a 2.7mm Kolibri semiauto. About a thousand of these were made between 1910 and 1914, firing a 3-grain projectile at about 650 fps (for a total of 3 ftlb of muzzle energy). It may be insanely impractical, but it's a great pi...

The Mars pistol was designed by Sir Hugh Gabbett-Fairfax in England in 1898, and only 81 were produced by the time manufacturing ended in 1907. These pistols were chambered for several different cartridges, all of them tremendously powerful for the day (and really not equaled by another self-load...

During the late 1920s, it looked like the German Army was going to replace the P08 Luger with a less expensive sidearm, and several major German companies developed prototype guns to meet this anticipated need. The replacement ended up being postponed for nearly a decade (the P38 would be the eve...

Josef Nickl was one of the chief R&D designers at Mauser after the Federle brothers, and one of his pet projects was a rotating barrel military pistol developed from the Steyr-Hahn M1912 pistol. He built a number of prototypes of it while at Mauser, but the company never put it into production be...

Nicholas Pieper designed a blowback pocket pistol which was manufactured under license by Steyr in 1908. It was a reasonably successful pistol, and can be found today in .25ACP and .32ACP calibers. This particular one is an experimental version scaled up to .45ACP, with the intention of making mi...

Before he adapted it to .45 caliber for US Army pistol trials, Jens Schouboe was building his pistol design in .32 ACP (7.65mm Browning). It was a blowback action, hammer fired, and very quick and easy to field strip. The gun was reliable and well made, but just didn't catch on in the market, and...

Grant Hammond is best known (to the extent he is known at all) for a .45 caliber pistol submitted to US military trials in 1917 and 1918. This pistol is a proof of concept prototype embodying some of the concepts that would go into the later .45 caliber pistol, and also showing some concepts that...

George A. Wilson was a designer for the High Standard company, and also a competitive bullseye pistol shooter. Formal bullseye shooting requires the use of a .45 caliber pistol, and the 1911 really isn't an ideal design for that sort of shooting - so Wilson decided to make his own pistol. Patente...

One of the more interesting (and rare!) variations on John Browning's iconic 1911 automatic pistol is the Obregon. Developed in Mexico in the mid 1930s, this pistol uses a frame nearly identical to the stock 1911, but has a completely different locking system. It uses a rotating barrel, like a St...

The New Model Melior was patented just before World War One, but did not go into production until 1920. It was a visual lookalike of the FN Model 1910, where the (retroactively named) Old Model Melior had been a copy of the FN Model 1900. The New Model was actually a remarkably well designed and ...

During World War Two, the British government contracted for about 8,000 Ballester Molina pistols from HAFDASA in Argentina. They were produced between 1942 and 1944, and are easily identified by the application of a second serial number on the left side with a "B" prefix. The exact details of the...

F.H. Audley was a saddler who ran a business in New York City starting in the 1870s. As his business in horse tackle declined with the spread of automobiles, he found himself looking for other product lines. In 1906 he moved to a location across the street form a New York police station, and foun...

In 1977, Arcadia Machine & Tool introduced the Hardballer, the first commercial stainless steel 1911. Stainless steel was a hot commodity, although there were some initial teething issues with slide/frame galling. Eventually, AMT introduced a number of additional 1911 models, including the Javeli...

In 1932, Walther made 10 custom long-barreled PP pistols for the Swiss target shooting community, sold through Glaser in Switzerland. These pistols had 127mm (5 inch) barrels chambered for .32 ACP, a fine satin "Verchromt" finish, extra checkering on the front and back straps, and a gold-plated t...

In an effort to appeal to American and British military testing commissions,
Georg Roth produced a handful of prototype Roth-Krnka pistols in .45 caliber. They used a proprietary cartridge; the 11.5mm Roth (approximately 200 grains at 660 fps, although more powerful versions of the cartridge wo...

In the late 1990s Colt was looking for pistols it could license for sale in the United States, in the wake of the failures of both eh Double Eagle and All-American 2000. They approached CZ, and also Vektor in South Africa. Vektor was just at the end of its production of the SP1 and SP2 pistols, w...

Today we're looking at the mechanics of the Bergmann-Bayard M1910/21 self-loading pistol. This particular one is a very nice example of the Danish-made late variant of the design.