Sorry for the clickbaity title. Here we have a gunsmith-made Swiss Jagdstutzer Martini rifle in 7.5x55 Swiss GP11. Kinda as close as you'll get to a real Martini-Henry sniper rifle, which is inexplicably contained in the game Battlefield 1 BF1 for no apparent reason...

The gentlemen of the Kentucky Victorian Riflemen instigated a 5 round speed loading challenge this year and invited Chappy to participate. He of course stepped up with a French rifled musket in a manly calibre!

Here we have a heroic guest contribution featuring a Snider three band rifle all the way from Alberta Canada which came out of an unrelated competition, however it was too good not to share with you as part of our single shot military black powder cartridge rifle series. Huzzah for Bob!

Chappy's tools and skills have come along a long way since his first attempt at reviving the chonky 18mm rimfire case and cartridge. Time to give it another shot. Will he succeed of will they blow up in his face?

For the accompanying nerdy machining vid, see our sister channel elsewhere.

We return to the single shot BP military cartridge rifle mad minute with the Swiss Peabody, representative of any of the Peabody series. This particular rifle is of course chambered for 10.4x38R and is fitted with a rimfire breech block but I have dropped in a spare breech block from a CF Spanish...

Here we have a great submission from Åmund in Norway who kindly gave us permission to share his mad minute. The RB was much requested in the comments of the prior rifles so it's fantastic to be able to bring it to you at last.

Thanks to Robert of Gruenig and Elmiger (not allowed to link, sorry), I got to put one of these antediluvian Martinistutzer target rifles in front of the camera! This one was originally in 7.5x55 GP11 and was converted to .22 lr. Tipping block: what's not to like? Basically a Martin-actioned accu...

Finally we are able to present you with a mad minute featuring the trapdoor rifle, not thanks to Bloke or Chap, but rather thanks to one of our awesome fans who took it upon himself to have a go.

You did the rifle justice. Fantastic run! The BotR community thanks you Oliver!

Chap flogs a dead horse by persisting to find an easy way to shoot with the Dreyse M55 Langblei. The sabot is the main sticking point as the original method of rolling and pressing paper and card is a long process with often varying results on target between batches. To try and solve this issue C...

The advent of the percussion era and developments in gun carriages brings about the design of a new short handy musketoon for French artillery crews. Issued from 1829 onwards, initially as a smoothbore flintlock, the musketoon evolves through the final stages of muzzleloading technology.

LEGAL...

Here we take up the mad minute challenge with the two main belligerents of the Franco-Prussian war, both needle-fire and both using what we now call caseless ammunition. Not ejector needed and no need to pick up your brass. Who will win this epic dual?

A tutorial for the new chassepot cartidge ...

The Chap explains the mechanics behind this curious rifle and gives a potted history of the concept more extensively used by the Norwegians. All this followed by a trip to the range to see how it performs.

Update: Since filming this it appears that the lastest dated rifle was 1864 despite tran...

Was there any real speed advantage to a bolt action over other breechloading actions before the advent of repeating mechanisms? The chap aims to find out with a mad minute modified to reflect the 1870s

Further research has enabled us to guestimate the composition of the cartridges for the 1837 chasseur carbine. We have both the extensively trialed (but never adopted) Brunéel cartridge and the cartridge for the 1840 chasseur carbine, a carbine using the same Delvigne breech, calibre and rifling ...

Chasseurs à pied (aka riflemen or jaegers) were a relatively late addition to the French army, with the first battalions being officially created in 1839. A new firearm was needed for these chasseurs as future sharpshooters and shock troops. Luckily a new rifled percussion carbine had already req...

Switzerland was a bit late in the game when it came to universally adopting rifled longarms, and the path do to so was long and tortuous. We explore this journey and also the service cartridge. Once the 1859 modification was approved, the service life of the musket was short due to the arrival of...

The first production of a carbine model of the Trapdoor Springfield was the Model 1870 (excluding 4 prototypes produced in 1868). There was a focus infantry rifles in theTrapdoor program, and just 362 of these carbines were made in 1870. They use the short receiver of the 1870 rifle, a 21 3/4” b...

Patented in 1868 by Colonel G.H. Money and Mr. M. Walker, this rifle was one of the 10 finalists in the British breechloading rifle trials of 1868. It is a simple falling block system with an internal hammer. In the second set of trials, it proved to be middle of the pack in rapidity of fire (20...

Remington introduced the No.7 Rolling Block in 1903, and it was the last pattern of the action to be introduced. They were expensive, hand fitted guns, costing $24 in 1903 (compared to $12 for a standard No.2 pattern Rolling Block). The only reason Remington made them was that they were built on...

The movie industry has always had special requirements for firearms. Flintlocks, for example, can be rather finicky guns for folks to use without practice and care, and that does not work will in a filming environment where a whole scene's setup would be wasted it a flintlock fails to fire proper...

This is an interesting single-shot breechloading system built by Kuhn of Besançon - a city near Switzerland in eastern France. It is clearly a sporting rifle, firing an 11mm black powder cartridge and probably dates to the 1870s or 1880s. It automatically ejects an empty case when opened and aut...

Designed by brothers Charles and Sebre Howard and first patented in 1862, this is a single shot lever action produced by the Whitneyville Armory between 1866 and 1870. It is a really neat compact design that is all contained within a tube. The system was made in rifle, sporting rifle, and shotgun...

In 1865, brothers William and George Miller of Meriden CT patented a system to convert percussion muskets to use the new Rimfire ammunition that was becoming available. Between 1865 and 1867, the local Meridan Manufacturing Company converted 2,000 surplus US Model 1861 muskets (mostly made by Par...

The Norwegian Kongsberg factory has a history of making firearms-based tools for maritime use, and one of the more recent is the M52 line-throwing gun, introduced in the 1950s and sold through the 1970s. It uses a repurposed Mauser action paired with a new smoothbore barrel and a 12mm blank cartr...