The SL-8 was Heckler & Koch’s civilianized version of the G36 military rifle. There was, unsurprisingly, a major interest in semiautomatic civilian copies of the G36, but H&K was in a difficult position to meet the demand. At the time (mid-1990s) such a rifle was subject to both the 1989 assault ...

The Remington Model 8 was one of the first successful self-loading rifles introduced to the commercial market, and it was designed by none other than John Browning. It was an expensive rifle, but popular for its power and reliability. In the 1920s, an entrepreneur founded the Peace Officer Equipm...

The Model 1918/30 is a semiauto-only carbine made by Beretta in between the early Model 1918 submachine guns and the excellent Model 38 family. It was marketed (well, sold) primarily to security and police forces, for whom the semiautomatic limitation was not a particular hindrance. It is chamber...

In the previous video, we looked at the Winchester G30M rifle as it was submitted to Marine Corps trials in 1940. When the trial result came back with the G30M in last place, Winchester immediately assigned David Williams to work on adapting it to resolve the problems found in testing. What Willi...

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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...

Paul Mauser spent nearly 20 years attempting to perfect a self-loading rifle for military service. He came closest with this, his 1913 patent model, which was used by German balloon and aircraft fliers as the Model 1915 and Model 1916 respectively - but these rifles were also sold on the commerci...

The Hagen is an early semiauto rifle designed by a Norwegian, manufactured in the UK, and tested by several different militaries - but adopted by none. It uses a long stroke gas piston and a two-lug rotating bolt to operate. Compared to other contemporary rifles, it was a quite light and sleek de...

The original design of the M1 Garand as adopted in 1936 used a “gas trap” system instead of a gas port drilled in the barrel. This system used a type of muzzle cap and false muzzle to redirect gas into the gas cylinder in the short distance between the end of the rifled barrel and when the bullet...

In a last hopeful attempt to get a rifle adopted and produced for the US military, John Pedersen designed his own copy of the M1 Garand rifle in the late 1930s (approximately 1939). His toggle-locked rifles had been irreversibly rejected, and the Garand rifle fully adopted by 1936. Pedersen's exa...

The Swiss factories of SIG and W+F Bern both produced a remarkable number and variety of experimental self-loading rifles in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. Nothing would be adopted by the Swiss military until the StG-57, but these two firms were continuously working to develop a military self-load...

The Mauser Selbstlader M1915 was the result of many years of work by the Mauser brothers to develop a semiautomatic rifle suitable for military use. They tried many different types of operating systems, and this one is a particularly unusual recoil-operated mechanism.

Only about 600 of these rif...

On October 1, 1928, the US War Department published a request for semiautomatic rifle designs. The Colt company submitted this .276 caliber rifle to the ensuing trials in 1929. It was designed by Jonathan Edward "Ed" Browning (half brother of John Moses Browning) and was a recoil-operated, tiltin...

Like most other nations with modern military forces. Czechoslovakia was interested in developing a semiautomatic infantry rifle in the 1920s and 1930s. The most successful such rifle to come out of Czech factory during this time was The ZH-29, but it did have competition. A major series of trials...

In the 1930s, the Italian military (like all major military forces at the time) was investigating options for a semiautomatic service rifle. Beretta's Tulio Marengoni developed one such rifle, and submitted it in two forms.

The first version of the rifle was produced in 1931, chambered for the t...

With the death of Jonathan "Ed" Browning in 1939, development of the Winchester G30 rifle was passed into the hands of a new employee at Winchester by the name of David Marshall Williams. Williams would become widely known as "Carbine" Williams in later years thanks to Jimmy Stewart and Hollywood...

During the 1920s, a lot of experimental rifle development work was being done in the US. The military was interested in finding a semiautomatic rifle, and plenty of inventors were eager to get that valuable military contract. One particular item of interest to the military was the possibility of ...

After Jonathan Edward "Ed" Browning had his 1929 rifle dropped form US military testing, he took the design back to his shop in Utah and kept working on it. By 1938 he had made enough improvements that he was ready to present the gun to Winchester, hoping they would be interested in purchasing th...

The Japanese military experimented with self-loading rifle designs through the 1930s, and had 4 major rifles in testing during that period. One was a new design by Kijiro Nambu, one was a Pedersen copy made by the Tokyo Army Arsenal, one was a gas operated toggle locking rifle by the Nippon Speci...

The RPD was the first belt-fed light machine gun (or squad automatic weapon) developed by the Soviet Union. It was designed in 1944 for the then-new M43 cartridge (7.62x39mm), although wartime exigencies followed by post-war rebuilding prevented it from being issued until the 1950s. It is a fairl...

The AKU-94 was a bullpup conversion kit made for standard AK rifles by
K-Var a while back. They were never particularly popular, probably because
in stock form they weren't particularly good. The sights are wobbly and
mediocre, the triggers were awful, the magazine was a very tight fit, and
t...

The first US military night vision system used in active combat was the T3 Carbine system - an infrared light-amplifying scope and IR floodlight mounted on an M1 Carbine. About 150 of these were used on Okinawa, and were quite effective. The system was refined over time, and by the Korean War thi...