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...

The M1908 Mondragon is widely acknowledged to have been the first self-loading rifle adopted as a standard infantry arm by a national military force. There are a couple earlier designs used by military forces, but the Mondragon was the first really mass-produced example and deserves its place in ...

Thanks to web site reader John D, we have a chance today to look at a very scarce Danish-made copy of the AG-42B Ljungman rifle. The Madsen company in Denmark made about 50 of these rifles for military trials, in several different calibers. This one, and a few others, were imported with a batch o...

When the US military decided to seriously look at replacing the 1903 Springfield with a semiautomatic service rifle, two designers showed themselves to have the potential to design an effective and practical rifle. One was John Garand, and the other was John Pedersen. Pedersen was an experienced ...

The Remington Model 8 (and the 81, which is mechanically identical) was an early self-loading rifle design by John Browning, and was produced from 1906 into the 1950s. It was available in 4 calibers initially, all of them being rimless, bottlenecked proprietary jobs - the .25, .30, .32, and .35 R...

See more photos and a full description at:

https://www.forgottenweapons.com/early-semiauto-rifles/anonymous-blishross/

The firm of Sedgley Inc of Philadelphia was a gun company involved in many aspects of the industry. They made rifle barrels for the US military, they made the rather goofy "Glove Guns" for the US Navy, and they did a lot of commercial gunsmithing, including high-quality sporter conversions of mil...

Although it was adopted by the Israeli military in the 1950s, the Uzi submachine gun did not generate much interest in the United States until the 1980s. The guns were used in limited numbers by the CIA covertly in Vietnam (and elsewhere), and also by various security elements of the US governmen...

Ross Rudd was born in Toronto in 1915, but his family moved to Springfield Massachusetts in 1917, and he would grow up there. Interested in guns and gun design from an early age, Rudd went to work for Savage in 1940, where he was involved in Lee Enfield production and the simplification of the Th...

The ZH-29 was an influential early semiautomatic military rifle, although not one that saw any significant adoption. As best I can tell, only two countries purchased them in any quantity: China and Ethiopia. This ZH-29 is an Ethiopian contract example, with an Ethiopian Lion of Judah on the recei...

At the turn of the 20th Century, prior to World War I, there were actually three semiauto sporting rifles on the market in the US. The two commonly known ones are the Winchester Model 5/7/10 and the Remington Model 8 - much less recognized is the Standard Arms Model G. It was a rifle that could b...

Thanks to Alex C. at TheFirearmBlog, I recently had an opportunity to do some shooting with a .276 caliber Vickers-Pedersen model PB rifle. This was one of the very first rifles Vickers built when they though the Pedersen would be adopted by the US military and couple be further marketed worldwid...

When the German military started looking for a self-loading rifle in the late 1930s, they had a pretty strict set of requirements. Most significantly, the rifles could not have gas ports or recoiling barrels, could not have moving parts on top of the action, and had to be capable of being operate...

The Gyrojet was one of the more creative and one of the most futuristic firearms innovations of the last few decades - unfortunately it wasn't able to prove sustainable on the market.

The idea was to use burning rocket fuel to launch projectiles, instead of pressurized gas. The advantage was t...

The M14E2, later redesignated the M14A1, was the replacement for the ill-fated heavy barrel M15 rifle. Both were intended to fill the role of the BAR in providing automatic fire in support of M14 rifles. The M15 program was cancelled before any rifles were built, and the M14E2 that replaced it wa...

We have done a number of videos recently on various different Pedersen long guns (the PA rifle, the Japanese copy, shooting the PB rifle, etc), but there was one version that I have not covered yet (aside from the US trials rifles). That's the Vickers factory PA carbine. Only a small number of th...

The Holek Automat was a semiautomatic sporting rifle designed by Emmanuel Holek. Emmanuel was also the designer of the ZH-29 rifle, and brother of Vaclav and Franticek Holek, who developed the ZB-26 and ZB-53 machine guns. Emmanuel left the Brno factory to run his own gun shop, where he offered (...

Ferdinand von Mannlicher was a brilliant and prolific European gun designer with more than a few widely-adopted military arms to his name. One of his very last guns was this carbine, which was also one of the first intermediate cartridge carbines developed. It was a mostly experimental gun, and n...

Paul Mauser was very persistent - if ultimately unsuccessful - in his long-tim goal to create a practical semiautomatic rifle using a full-power cartridge. In total he tried some 17 different designs, including one in 1901 which suffered a burst casing during test firing and cost him an eye.

...

The Smith & Wesson 1940 Light Rifle is one of the spectacular failures of arms design, on several levels. It was too expensive, too heavy, too fragile (ironically, given the weight), too difficult to manipulate, and just all-in-all bad. To put the bad-ness in perspective, the British cancelled th...

Today we're looking at one of Ohio Ordnance's semiauto M1918A3 BARs - how it shoots, how it works, and what the pros and cons of the military BAR variants were in World War I and World War II.