http://www.forgottenweapons.com John Browning's Auto-5 long recoil shotgun was the first mass-produced semiauto shotgun, and would eventually become the second best-selling semiauto shotgun in the world (not bad for the first one to hit the market). It was patented in 1900 and initially manufactured by FN in Belgium, with Remington starting production in 1905. This particular one is in 12 gauge.

http://www.forgottenweapons.com One of the many projects that AR-15 designer Jim Sullivan was involved in through his long career was a project to found the Wayne Repeating Arms Company (or WRA Co., not to be inadvertently confused with any other gun company with those initials). The company was backed financially by none other than John "the Duke" Wayne of movie fame, and its first product was to be a semiauto .22 rimfire rifle to compete with the Ruger 10/22. Sullivan designed the rifle and two prototypes were built in 1977 or thereabouts. Unfortunately, at this point Wayne had a falling out with his son-in-law (who was his business manager), and the new business manager who stepped in was not interested in the gun project. As a result, the funding ended and the project came to a rather abrupt end. However, Sullivan still has the two prototype rifles, and gave us a look at them. Frankly, I think they could have probably done pretty well against Ruger (especially with an association to John Wayne). Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

http://www.forgottenweapons.com The StG-45(M) was developed by engineers at Mauser right at the end of WWII, and its designers went on to form Heckler & Koch and this rifle was their basis for the H&K roller-delayed blowback series of weapons (HK91, HK33, HK53, HK21, MP5, etc). Twenty sets of parts for the StG-45(M) were produced at Mauser, although the war ended before any were made into complete guns (a few were finished by Allied intelligence units after the war for testing). The rifle is chambered for 8x33 Kurz, and handles extremely well. For more information on these rifles and their development into the H&K series, please see my video "Last Ditch Innovation": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEPwmYcCPFs

http://www.forgottenweapons.com The No.5 MkI Enfield, commonly called the "jungle carbine" is nearly the shortest-lived rifle in British military service. Introduced in 1944, they were declared obsolete in 1947 as the result of insoluble accuracy problems. The guns were originally developed from regular No4 Enfield rifles with the goal of producing a shorter and lighter variant for paratroops. This was done by shortening the barrel, adding a flash hider, and making lightening cuts in several places on the barrel and receiver (which were the cause of the problems that doomed the gun). Not all No.5 rifles produced developed problems, and they were certainly handier than the regular Enfield rifles. They are noted for kicking harder, of course, and this is not really helped by the narrow rubber buttpad they came with (most of which are nice and hard today). Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

https://www.full30.com/video/9eef6b3a4eb6c8846a4c8dc4b8968bc4 No reasonable person would throw their rifle down into a pool of pudding-like mud. But what if you did anyway? How well can different rifle designs handle that abuse? We decided to find out. We took an M1A (generally considered extremely reliable), an AR (generally considered terribly unreliable), and a MAS 49/56 (French, and generally unknown) and got down and dirty with them.

http://www.forgottenweapons.com The Steyr M1912, or Steyr Hahn (meaning "hammer", to distinguish it from the striker-fired Steyr 1907) has a number of features that make it unusual among pistols today. It uses a fixed internal magazine fed via stripper clips, and a short recoil, rotating barrel locking system. Only a handful of other pistols have been made with rotating barrel systems, like the Steyr 1907, Beretta PX4, Savage 1907/1915, Mexican Obregon, Colt All-American 2000, MAB P-15, Boberg, and CZ-24. Rotating barrel pistols are often touted as being more accurate than others (generally the comparison is made against Browning-type tilting barrel designs), but this appears to be entirely theoretical. Any true advantage is small enough to be overridden by other factors. Between 1912 and 1919 about 300,000 of these pistols were made for the Austrian military, which used them alongside Rast & Gasser M1898 revolvers. The 9mm Steyr cartridge they fire is roughly equivalent to 9mm Parabellum, despite having a longer case. Some 60,000 of the pistols were later converted to 9x19 after the Anschluss and used by the German military in WWII.

http://www.forgottenweapons.com The Type 97 was a copy of the Czech ZB-26 machine gun which was used in early Japanese tanks and tankettes. It is chambered for 8mm Mauser, and uses standard ZB-26 20-round magazines. This particular one is in the collection of the owner at Battlefield Vegas, a machine gun rental range in Las Vegas. It is particularly cool because in addition to the gun, he has the mounting point cut out of a Type 35 tankette which fits the gun. Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

The "Apache" was a combination knife, brass knuckle, and revolver made by several companies in Belgium and France, which became associated with a group of street thugs in Paris around the turn of the century. Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons The Cobray Terminator is an unusual - and unusually impractical - single-shot 12 gauge shotgun. It uses a sort of open bolt system in which the barrel is under spring pressure, and slams backwards into a fixed firing pin when the trigger is pulled. Only about 1500 of these were made before they were discontinued due to poor sales (not because of ATF intervention, as some people believe). http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

Starr revolvers are one of the less recognized designs used in the US Civil War, although tens of thousands of them were made and issued. Indeed, in many ways they were superior to the much more common Colt and Remington revolvers of the period. One of the interesting facts about the Starr is that the double action design came first, and was only replaced with the more typical single action design several years into the war (due to problems with price and complexity). Today we're taking a look at a pair of Starrs, one single action and one double action. Ultimately the company shut down after the end of the war, and Colt would go on to dominate the revolver market in the United States. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

The Khyber Pass is a well known center of arms production, with gunmaking there going back at least 100 years. The quality of craftsmanship varies greatly, from excellent and safe weapons to thoroughly unsafe guns made with little more than hand files and drills. In the last decade or so, much of the production has centered around making guns for sale to Western soldiers to take home as souvenirs. Since antique guns can generally be imported to places like the US and UK with minimal paperwork, gunsmiths build copies of the arms used by the British in their last occupation of Afghanistan - Martini Henrys. This particular one is a .303 caliber pistol, adorned extensively with decorations and with a laughably crude copy of British service markings. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

Sylvester Roper was a great example of the classic American inventor - he had a wide range of interests, and affected technological development in more than one industry. This shotgun is a design he patented in 1866, which uses a 4-round magazine of the 12ga shells. It has an unusual mechanism which fires from an open bolt. This particular example is missing its magazine internals and has a broken bolt, but is the first actual Roper I have come across. Roper went on to work with Christopher Spencer developing the pump-action shotgun, although he is best known for his work on motorcycles (which he was actually the first inventor of, according to some). http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

The 1905 Steyr-Mannlicher was developed by Ferdinand Mannlicher, one of Europe's most prolific gun designers. It uses the 7.65mm Mannlicher cartridge, which is roughly equivalent to .32 ACP, with a 10-round fixed internal magazine. The 1905 is, in my opinion, a fantastically elegant pistol, handles very well, and has minimal recoil thanks to its light cartridge. The ammunition used in this video is 1940s Argentine surplus (the single largest batch of pistols was sold to the Argentine Navy), which is known for having hard and dud primers (as you will see at the end of the video). Mechanically, the pistol is a sort-of delayed blowback. It has a spring-loaded cam pushing against the breech that theoretically delays opening, but in practical fact it doesn't have a significant impact. You can see how quickly the breech opens in the video... http://www.forgottenweapons.com

The Ladies Home Companion was a pistol (technically) made by the Cobray company on the same frame as their 12ga "Street Sweeper" shotgun. It had no stock or front grip, and was chambered for the .45-70 rifle cartridge, carrying 12 rounds in its fixed drum magazine. It's kinda like watching a train wreck...you know you shouldn't, but you kinda want one anyway. These sold even worse than the Streetsweeper, but they at least didn't have an egregiously offensive name and thus were never the target of a major lobbying campaign. Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

Right at the beginning of the 20th century, there were 3 options on the market for semiauto commercial sporting rifles in the US: the Remington Model 8, the Winchester 1905/1907 Self-Loader, and the Standard Arms Model G. The Remington and Winchester were both good guns, and sold well - the Standard Arms was pretty much a flop, and has definitely become a forgotten weapon today. The Model G used a tilting bolt like the FAL and a long-stroke gas piston to cycle, and had the interesting option of allowing the shooter to disable the gas system and run the rifle as a pump action instead. It was available in the standard Remington autoloader cartridges, with .30 Remington seeming to have been the most common (and both of these examples are in .30). http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

During the Chinese civil war in the 1920s and 30s, international arms embargoes made rifles difficult to acquire - which led to a lot of popularity for pistols with shoulder stocks. The C96 "broomhandle" Mauser in particular was popular, and it was copied by a number of Spanish firms for sale in China as well (in fact, the fully automatic Schnellfeuer version was initially made by Mauser specifically for Chinese sale). The .45 ACP cartridge also became popular with Thompson submachine guns in some areas, and the natural result was a Chinese arsenal designing and producing a C96 Mauser pistol scaled up to use .45 ACP. A few thousand of these were originally made in Shansei from 1928-1931, and then another batch was made for export in the 1980s. They are actually the same basic size as the C96 (and retain the 10-round capacity), but are much wider and heavier. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

The Winchester 1897 was the gun that really set the standard for the now-ubiquitous pump action shotgun. It was designed by John Browning, but was not the first pump action designed and sold. That credit goes to Christopher Spencer, who put the first pump action on the market in 1882. His patent on the concept (in conjunction with co-designer Sylvester Roper) forced competitors to develop workarounds (like the sliding trigger and grip of the Burgess pump shotgun) until 1893, when Winchester released Browning's design. Winchester was promptly sued by Bannerman, who had purchased the production line and patents for the Spancer shotgun, and the court case did not finally resolve until 1897. That was actually a potential blessing for Winchester, as the initial 1893 design was not designed to handle the new smokeless powder, and was only chambered for 2 5/8 inch shells. By the time Winchester won the patent case in 1897, it had become clear that smokeless powder was here to stay, and that sooner or later people would start running 2 3/4" smokeless shells in their 1893 shotguns, which would break and potentially injure people. In a very early example of product liability recall, Winchester replaced the gun with the new, strong 1897 model and offered to exchange the old guns for new ones at no cost. The 1893 models thus turned in were destroyed by the company, leading to their scarcity today. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

The Bullard company was one of the lesser-known firearm manufacturers during the late 1800s, producing both single-shot falling block and lever-action repeating rifles. This particular example is a .45 caliber large-frame sporter. It was originally a very fancy, high end version of the gun, and saw quite a lot of use in the last 130 years... http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

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 in whichever configuration they liked (and it was before the NFA placed regulations on pistols with shoulder stocks). Today, these guns may still be used with the stock, as they have been specifically exempted from the NFA because of their historical and collectible value. Mechanically, the Fiala is unusual because despite its appearance it is not a semiautomatic design. Instead, the shooter must manually operate the slide between shots. This made the gun less expensive to manufacture, and theoretically more reliable. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

Manufactured in Brooklyn from 1861 until 1863, Moore's revolver was a 7-shot single-action piece firing .32 rimfire cartridges. What makes it unique is its swing-out cylinder design - the first commercial revolver in the US to use this mechanism. A latch on the back of the frame released the entire barrel and cylinder assembly, allowing it to tip over to the right, exposing the chambers for loading and unloading. The ejector rod is stored under the barrel, but must be removed and used by hand when needed. Moore's revolvers were popular with New Yorkers heading off to the Civil War and almost 8000 were made, but production was halted when Rollin White successfully sued for patent infringement (over his patent on the bored-though cylinder). http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

The Vickers machine gun was an evolution of the Maxim, the world's first successful machine gun. The Vickers was adopted by the British armed forces shortly before World War I and remained in active service until 1968. It is renowned as one of the most durable and reliable machine guns ever made, with one gun recorded to have fired more than 120,000 rounds in a single 12-hours period in combat. This Vickers has been rebuilt as a semiauto-only gun, and is this not regulated by the NFA and can be sold like any typical rifle or pistol (no tax stamp needed). http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

The M1878 was the last new rifle produced by the Sharps company before it went out of business in 1881. It was the invention of none other than German gun designer Hugo Borchardt, better known for his C93 Borchardt automatic pistol (generally considered the first commercially successful automatic pistol). Borchardt was brought in as superintendent of the Sharps company in 1876, and his rifle was well ahead of its time. Its use of coil springs, a striker-fired mechanism, and sleek lines gave it an unusual appearance for its time, and hindered sales. It would not be until after the company has dissolved that the Schützen community would begin to truly appreciate the potential of the Sharps-Borchardt rifle. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

The 1862 Police Pocket was the last of Colt's percussion revolvers. It was a combination of the small 1849 model frame (intended for .31 caliber) and a 5-shot .36 caliber cylinder. The frame was stepped to allow the larger cylinder to fit without require any changes to the lockwork, and the result was a rather nice svelte revolver offering both reasonable firepower and relatively compact size. This particular one was exported to the UK at some point, as evidenced by its British proof marks, and also comes with the original case and accessories. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

As the self-contained metallic cartridge because popular, a niche industry developed in converting percussion revolvers to use the new cartridges. One of the first of these conversions was designed by F. Alexander Thuer and marketed by the Colt company itself. Thuer's conversion was put into production while the Rollin White patent was still in force, and so it was prevented from using a bored-through cylinder. The get around this, Thuer developed his own proprietary centerfire cartridge with no rim and a very slight taper. These cartridges were loaded from the front of the cylinder and press-fit into place. While this made the conversion legal to sell commercially, it had a number of problems (in addition the use of proprietary ammunition) which led to it quickly losing favor as soon as White's patent expired. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

Elmer Keith's No.5 Single Action Army is arguably the most famous custom revolver ever made. Keith had it built in 1928 after developing a friendship with Harold Croft, another revolver enthusiast. Croft had shown Keith his own custom revolvers, which he had numbered 1 through 4. Croft had been trying to make an ideal pocket gun, and Keith used several of his ideas along with some of Keith's own to put together a revolver for general-purpose field use. In recognition of Croft's work, Keith called his gun Number 5. It featured an extended flat top with windage-adjustable sights, an improved mainspring, redesigned cylinder pin, custom hammer spur, and modified Bisley grip. It was chambered for the .44 Special/.44 Russian cartridges (the Russian being a slightly shorter version of the Special), and it was Keith's favorite shooting piece until the .44 Magnum cartridge was introduced in the late 1950s. He described this gun in detail in a 1929 American Rifleman article entitled "The Last Word". http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

Early in the production of the C96 Mauser, the company tried a variety of different configurations of the pistol, to see what would be popular and sell well. Most of these were abandoned by about 1902, when the design was more or less standardized to the version were are familiar with today. One of the early experiments was with a 20-round fixed magazine, or which 188 were made. This was fed using two 10-round stripper clips, and that seems to have been the biggest problem with it. According to some folks who have used these, the magazines is quite difficult to fully load, making the 10-shot version rather more practical. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

BSA (Birmingham Small Arms) was the largest private arms maker in the UK during World War One, and when the war ended it of course saw its huge military contracts evaporate. One of BSA's efforts to develop new markets and product lines was to devise a series of self-loading pistols. These also involved the use of a line of new belted rimless cartridges made by Kynoch. Very few of there pistols survive today, and this .45 ACP example is one of them. It is a short recoil, rotating barrel design, with a trigger mechanism very similar to the FN 1910, and the rotating barrel system very similar to the Steyr-Hahn 1912. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

This particular 1902-made example of the C96 Mauser incorporates several experimental features of the design that would never go into mass production. It was an effort to make a version of the C96 that would be more suitable for civilian carry - something a bit lighter and more compact than the military style. To this end, it has a smaller grip profile, a shorter barrel, and a shortened 6-round magazine. Most evidently, it also has an experimental safety that was intended to be more suitable for one-handed use. Unfortunately, the safety bit into the shooters hand badly with each shot, and only a few were ever made before the idea was dropped. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

The Schouboe is best known in the US as one of the pistols that competed in the 1907 Army pistol trials, unsuccessfully. It was designed in Denmark by Jens Schouboe, whose much more notable accomplishment was the Madsen light machine gun. The Schouboe pistol was a simple blowback design chambered in .45 caliber, but used a special cartridge with a lightweight bullet (63 grains; an aluminum-jacketed wooden core) at a high velocity (about 1600fps). This is the reason is was dismissed form the US Army trials, as they wanted a pistol using the .new .45 ACP cartridge (230 grains at 800 fps). I was particularly impressed by the very simple disassembly procedure, which is faster than any modern pistol I can think of. This video includes two different Schouboe pistols; one is a standard example with metal grips (and missing its magazine), and the other is a fancy gold-inlaid example made for the President of Uruguay. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

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 military or commercial sales in the US. One unusual trait it shares with the smaller versions is its lack of extractor - as a blowback design it will function without one, but the shooter must break the action open to manually remove an unfired cartridge. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to try my own hand at shooting the legendary Elmer Keith's personal carry gun, a Smith & Wesson pre-Model 29 in .44 Magnum. It's a fantastic piece of shooting steel, and was a joy to shoot, even if I couldn't handle it anywhere near like Keith did.

This prototype Webley was one of just under 1,000 Model 1910 pistols produced by the company in an effort to get some military and police interest in their .38/9mm automatics. It was tested by a number of organizations (including, notably, the London Metropolitan Police) but not adopted by any. This particular one includes a number of unique features, most notably the lack of a grip safety (which was otherwise a standard feature in the Model 1910). http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

The M1895 Lee Navy was a rifle well ahead of it's time - a smallbore (6mm) straight-pull bolt action adopted by the US Navy at the same time that the US Army was adopting the Krag-Jorgenson. The Lee Navy was designed by James Paris Lee (the same man who designed the Lee Enfield action), and was a limited commercial success for Winchester with 20,000 being sold in total. Half of those went to the US Navy, and they were issued to shipboard armories and Marine Corps units. One of the ships which received an allotment of Lee Navy rifles was the USS Maine, and its rifles were on board when she exploded and sank in the Havana harbor, helping to start the Spanish-American War. Several dozen of these rifles were salvaged shortly after the sinking (it happened in less than 50 feet of water) and were sold on the commercial market by the Francis Bannerman company. This rifle is one of those few documented to have come off the Maine, making it a fantastic piece of history. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

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-loading pistol until the Automag). Русская версия: https://youtu.be/mnLOWNlN3Cw Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

Before World War One, the Mauser company tried to make a follow-up automatic pistol to replace its famous C96 "Broomhandle" design with something more modern. The result was a very successful pocket pistol in .25ACP and .32ACP, and a series of unsuccessful blowback and delayed blowback service pistols in 9mm and .45ACP. This particular one is an intermediate example, with an internal delayed blowback system and buffer spring, but before the designers turned to a flap-style system to delay the action. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

The Model 1904 was basically the first working automatic pistol made by Webley (there was a 1903 toolroom experiment, but it didn't really work). Like all the Webley automatic that would follow, it was designed by William Whiting. The 1904 was the company's first effort at making a semiautomatic sidearm for the British military, so it was chambered for the .455 cartridge (a special rimless version made by Kynoch, after early experiments using the .455 rimmed revolver ammunition caused lots of problems stacking in magazines). It is a rather huge handgun, and uses a short recoil mechanism with two separate locking blocks. This particular one is s/n 23 - very few were made before it was rejected in military trials and Webley redirected its efforts toward smaller commercial pistols. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

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 eventual result), and this led to most of the prototype ideas being dropped. The Walther company had designed a scaled-up version of its very popular PP, which was to be called the MP. Only a small number were made - Fritz Walther himself carried one in 9x19mm, and this example was made in 9x23mm Steyr in hopes of attracting interest from the Chilean military. It is a simple blowback action, quite literally an enlarged PP. In my opinion, it feels fantastic in the hand - it is curious to consider what it would have felt like to shoot. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

The M1907/12 heavy machine gun was the standard mounted MG of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the First World War, and saw sporadic use clear through the end of WWII. The design is unusual among heavy machine guns because it is actually an unlocked, delayed blowback system. A combination of a heavy recoil spring and significant mechanical disadvantage is used to retard the breech to the point that extraction pressure is low enough to be safe (and extraction is aided by the use of a cartridge oiler). These are definitely underappreciated guns today, being one of the most compact and simple guns of their type. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

Austria was a hotbed of early repeating handgun design, first with manually operated designs and shortly thereafter with self-loaders. One of the men contributing to this development in the 1880s was Josef Schulhof, a farmer-turned-gunsmith who had a number of patents and designs to his credit. His first pistol was developed in 1884, and this particular 1887 model was an experimental improvement. It is chambered for the .320 British revolver cartridge, and has an 8-round tubular magazine built into the grip. As with many early repeaters, it uses a finger ring to cycle the action, and a sheath-type trigger to fire. I was able to open up the sideplate on this one, and we get a really good look at exactly how it all works. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

The Winchester Model 94 is one of the most iconic American sporting rifles ever made, and this particular one is chambered in the equally iconic .30-30 cartridge. It is a takedown version, made in 1907, and most interestingly of all, it comes with a legal and registered original Maxim Silencer. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

The Type 92 was the final iteration of a machine gun that began as the Model 1897 Hotchkiss HMG made in France. The Japanese army purchased many of these guns, and then produced their own slightly refined version. These in turn were replaced by the updated Type 3 (1914) heavy machine gun, and finally the Type 92 (1932). A lightened upgrade to the Type 92 was prototyped (the Type 1, 1941), but never went into production. Mechanically, the Type 92 is very much like a scaled-up Type 11 light machine gun, using 30-round strips to feed. Despite being generally derided today, these machine guns were very reliable, accurate, and effective. This particular one happens to have a 7mm Mauser barrel in it, from a South American contract. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

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 because of a combination of patent concerns and wartime contracts for other weapons. Eventually Nickl was able to arrange a contract for it to be produced at Brno, where it would become the CZ24 and then CZ27 pistol. This particular one is a larger example, in 9x19mm. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

As the Second World War started to really take a toll on German industrial production, several companies started to work on alternatives to the P38 handgun in an effort to reduce production cost and time. This is one such example made by Walther, with a normal type of milled slide and an experimental frame made from stamped sheet steel. It uses a rotating barrel mechanism taken from Nickl (and the Steyr-Hahn before him), and uses standard P38 magazines. None of these designs actually made it into production before the end of the war. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

Needlefire rifles were developed in the 1830s and represented and early effective type of breechloading rifle. As such, they were adopted by both German and French armies - but only in rifle form. Needlefire handguns were much less common. This particular design was patented in 1852 by a man named G.L. Kufahl in the UK, but ultimately manufactured under license by the Dreyse company. It was available in several configurations of caliber and barrel length, with this one being in .43 caliber. http://www.forgottenweapons.com Theme music by Dylan Benson - http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com

The T124E2 was the last US antitank gun, and was discontinued after only about 100 had been made - before it was put into service. It was a high velocity 76mm piece, and was replaced by the much smaller 75mm recoilless rifle.

http://www.forgottenweapons.com This month, Karl and I both shot my new Walther G41 rifle for the 2-Gun Action Challenge Match. I picked up this rifle from the recent RIA regional auction, and it had been missing a magazine and had thoroughly worn out recoil springs. I replaced the springs and found a magazine on eBay for it. With those parts, the rifle ran very well. We did discover one additional issue, namely that someone for some reason widened the stripper clip guides to fit Swedish clips, leaving them too wide to function with German or Romanian clips. This rifle will definitely feature in future videos, as I have a ZF-41 optic and a couple boxes of clips on order already. It has a very unusual gas-trap style operating system, but is an absolute delight to shoot! For more detailed information on the mechanics of the G41, check this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m38NQLwpQgo

http://www.forgottenweapons.com http://www.afte.org This is a presentation I gave to the Arizona local AFTE (Association of Firearm and Toolmark Examiners) group in February 2015 discussing some of the uses for high speed camera photography of firearms. Specifically, this presentation was based on the Edgertonic camera I have been using for about 8 months. Potential forensic uses of the camera include understanding the operating mechanisms of unusual firearms, determining the origin of class characteristic or individual markings on cartridge cases, understanding terminal impact effects of bullets or other projectiles, and diagnosing malfunctions in firearms.

In an effort to take advantage of Jim Bowie's popularity, George Elgin patented a huge knife attached to a single shot percussion pistol in 1837. The idea was simply to offer a dual-purpose weapon, and it proves that human nature never does change much. I suspect that in actual use the weapon would have been pretty awkward - bulky to carry, heavy for a pistol, and clumsy for a knife. However, that didn't stop two different manufacturers from making them on license, and several hundred willing buyers from shelling out money. In fact, the US Navy even purchased 150 of them for use in the South Seas, making the Elgin the first percussion handgun formally used by the US military. This particular one for sale at RIA is a commercial model made by Morrill, Mosman, and Blair.

The Colt House revolver, better known as the Cloverleaf (and sometimes as the Jim Fisk Model) was the first revolver Colt designed from the ground up for rimfire ammunition. It entered the market in 1871, and was only made for about 5 years. It's colloquial name came from its unusual 4-chamber, .41 caliber cylinder. The Jim Fisk moniker came when the larger-than-life robber baron "Jublilee Jim" Fisk was murdered by Ned Stokes with one of these revolvers over a love triangle gone bad. You can read about the events and the man at Murder By Gaslight, or pick up H.W. Brands' book for more detail. http://www.murderbygaslight.com/2010/06/jubilee-jim-fisk.html

During the 1950s, the US Army ran a series of programs trying to find a better solution for infantry rifles than firing single semiauto bullets. These projects (including SALVO, SALVO II, and SPIW) would include experiments with multiple barreled rifles, burst firing rifles, flechette firing weapons, and multiplex cartridges. That is, single cartridge cases with two or three bullets stacked inside. The idea was that a soldier would have a single sight picture, trigger press, and recoil impulse - but would have multiple chances to hit the target. This particular rifle is an M1 from the SALVO testing which is chambered for .22-06 Duplex, a .30-06 case necked down to .22 caliber with two 50-grain bullets fired at just under 3000 fps.

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 grip panel instead of a detachable magazine. To reload, one would push the locking catch and pull the left grip panel down, drop loose cartridges into the magazine area, and then latch the grip panel back up into place.

Most people who recognize the name Mondragon know it from Manuel Mondragon's model 1908 semiauto rifle, the first such rifle to be adopted on a large scale by a military (the Mexican Army, in this case). Well, Mondragon was designing arms for many years before that particular rifle. For example, in 1894 he produced a number of straight-pull bolt action rifles in cooperation with the Swiss firm SIG. Some of them, including this particular example, included a rather unique 3-position selector lever. In addition to the expected "safe" and "fire" modes, this also had an "automatic" setting, which would cause the rifle to fire as soon as the bolt was fully closed, without requiring the shooter to use the trigger. This was, in theory, for firing from the hip while advancing - but it clearly didn't turn out to be very practical.

The story of the .45ACP Lugers is a bit complex, and widely misunderstood. What most people believe is that two such guns were made for US military testing, one was lost, and the other is worth a million dollars. Well, that's virtually all incorrect. In actuality, probably about a half dozen were made in a couple different forms by DWM. That does include two for US trials, but neither of those guns is known to still exist. What is interesting is that it is actually pretty easy to know that. We have a photo of one of the original trials Lugers in the 1907 trial report, and when compared to the "million dollar Luger" (which actually went for just under $500,000 when it was last sold in 2010), it clearly has a slightly different grip angle. Fact is, the US insisted on a 60 degree grip angle instead of the standard 55.5 degrees for the Luger. The two trials guns were made with 60 degree grips, but the handful of other experimental and prototype .45ACP Lugers - including both of the ones currently known in the US - have the standard 55.5 degree grips. In addition, both of the ones in the US are chambered for standard .45ACP, where the trials guns used a 1906 version of the .45ACP cartridge which was a millimeter longer. The two guns in the US today are authentic DWM Lugers made by the factory in .45ACP, but they were made for purposes other than US military trials. There would have been potential for commercial sales, and other countries interested in a .45 version besides the US, and that was the reason those two guns (and probably a couple others since lost) were built. http://www.forgottenweapons.com

Two of the scarcest and least known of John Pedersen's designs are the Model GY and GX rifles, which are basically copies of the production model of the M1 Garand. After losing out in the Army rifle trials with his toggle-locked rifle design, Pedersen made one last attempt to garner a US military contract by building his own slightly modified version of the M1. It function the same way as the Garand, with a long-stroke piston, gas port right by the muzzle, and rotating bolt. However, Pedersen put some of his own touches on the rifle, including spiral barrel fluting, drain/cooling slots on the underside of the stock, and a rotating drum to adjust elevation on the rear sight. Less than 10 of the GY and GX rifles were ever made, and they (obviously) failed to make a significant impression on the US Army - they never went into any type of serial production. This one at Rock Island is in magnificent condition, and still full of cosmoline form when it was put in storage.

One of the many revolver systems designed to work around the Rollin White patent was the Pant's Patent cupfire revolver, made by Merwin & Bray in several calibers (.28, .30, and .42). This particular example is a nice on in .42 (which is the diameter of the cartridge case; the projectile is actually .39 caliber). The cupfire system was similar technically to rimfire, but with the priming compound in the base of the hollow cup at the end of the cartridge case. This allowed it to be loaded from the front of the cylinder, and fired by a hammer striking through a smaller hole in the rear of the cylinder.

https://www.createspace.com/5070216 I recently got a copy of Tom Davis Jr's brand new book on the history of British use of the Thompson SMG. This is very much a history book rather than a technical book, and it is based on meticulously researched documents from the British national archives, right down to the hand-written notes scribbled on telegrams and tally books. If you are interested in the United Kingdom's effort to supply arms during the first half of WWII or in the history of the Thompson in general, it is definitely a work to add to your reference library. http://www.forgottenweapons.com

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 would not see further use. This .32 ACP prototype features a hybrid blow forward / blowback mechanism in which the slide uses a gas trapping system to move forward and the bolt moves backward. It also has a unique system for automatically ejecting the magazine when empty. Truly one of the most mechanically unusual pistols I have ever seen.

Most countries still had anti-tank rifles in their military inventory at the beginning of WWII - the Solothurn S18-100, the Lahti L39, the Boys AT Rifle, the PTRD and PTRS, and so on. For Germany, this role was fulfilled by the Panzerbüchse 39, a single-shot falling block rifle firing a high velocity 8mm AP cartridge. It was nominally effective in the opening campaigns of the war, but was quickly rendered obsolete as Allied armor improved. German planners has a huge number (25,000) of these on hand for the invasion of Russia, where they expected Russian armor to be vulnerable to them - which was not the case. Most were subsequently converted into Granatbüchse 39 AT grenade launchers, which were then used until the end of the war. Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons

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 Browning 1900). The Type 70 shows features from the PPK and Makarov, as well as other elements not taken directly from existing designs. The hammer is an exposed single-action type, and the muzzle profile is very reminiscent of the Makarov. The action is simple blowback (in .32 ACP, despite the 7.62mm marking on the slide), but the barrel is set in the side and easily removed, instead of being fixed to the frame as is typical of blowback pistols. The safety is a cross-bolt button which doubles as the block holding the barrel in place. The Type 70 is quite comfortable in the hand, and probably nice to shoot given its .32ACP chambering.

Happy April Fool's Day! (FYI, the Yugo M92 in this contraption is a registered SBR, which allowed us to not create an illegal item by taping it to a rifle)

During the 1920s and 1930s, a combination of civil wars and international arms embargoes led to a lot of domestic firearms production in China. The size and quality of manufacturing facilities varied widely - everything from massive factories established with European technical assistance to one-man shops only a step or two above being blacksmiths. The weapons produced varied in quality to match. Among other weapons made during this period were handguns mechanically based on several European designs (the Browning 1900, Mauser C96, and Mauser 1910/14, primarily). These handguns show a huge variety of aesthetic designs, gibberish markings, and fake proof marks. They are virtually all single action, simple blowback designs, chambered for .32ACP or 7.63 Mauser. This auction at RIA includes a whole bunch of these pistols, so I picked out a handful of good examples to show some of the elements often seem among them.

Not all companies responded in the same way to the development of cartridge revolvers and the Rollin White patent. Allen & Wheelock, for example, decided to simply ignore the patent and make revolvers for their proprietary lipfire cartridges (fairly similar to rimfire) while relying on their lawyers to delay the anticipated patent infringement suit for as long as possible. Ultimately it took 4 years for Rollin White and S&W to gain a legal injunction against them, and when that did happen they were ready and converted their production to percussion revolvers of the same basic type. This particular piece is a .36 caliber ("Navy") version for the lipfire round, which have been since converted to use either lipfire or more common rimfire ammunition.

Andrew Burgess was an extremely prolific gun designer who gets very little recognition today. One of has particularly interesting weapons was a pump-action, folding shotgun. Because Spencer already had a patent on the use of the forearm as the pump, Burgess designed his gun to use a sliding sleeve on the wrist of the stock as the pump handle. The guns were well made, and the company Burgess set up to manufacture them was bought out and shut down by Winchester to reduce competition with their 1893/1897 pump action shotgun. As a result not many were made, and very very few of the folding models. This one is in fantastic shape, and also comes with an excellent leather belt holster made for carrying it folded. Русскоязычная версия: https://youtu.be/3j2ylBlJF84

Until the midle of the 20th century, the most powerful automatic pistol made was Sir Hugh Gabbett-Fairfax's Mars pistol. With the .45 caliber version approaching the energy of a .45 Winchester Magnum, it was quite the accomplishment for a gun designed initially in 1898! Well, RIA has a very early example of the Mars - serial number 4 - coming up for sale. This gun (chambered for the .360 Mars cartridge) has a number of features that differ from the more "typical" Mars pistols (all 80 or so that were ultimately made). These include a very long barrel, a tangent-style rear sight, and a 3-lug bolt instead of the standard 4-lug type. A very cool pistol to have a look at!

The Blake was one of many rifle designs submitted to the US Army trials that would ultimately result in the adoption of the Krag-Jorgensen as the US Army's standard rifle. The main innovation of Blake's design was a unique ammunition "packet" system which held 7 cartridges. The rifle would be loaded from the bottom with pre-loaded packets, which would be carried like clips or magazines by troopers. However, the loading was not as quick or simple as with more typical clips, and the trials board felt the packets were both too fragile and too bulky. Blake went on to submit his rifle for Navy testing a few years later, where it lost out to the Lee Navy straight pull. His last effort was commercial production of the rifles, which got him a few sales, but not enough to sustain manufacture. This example is one of the commercial rifles.

Gustloff was a large industrial concern in Germany which made many different weapons for the military. In addition to these, its attempted to market a small-caliber pistol for police or SS use. This pistol used an alloy frame (with steel inserts for durability in crucial areas) and steel slide, with a simple blowback mechanism and a fixed barrel similar to the Walther PPK. It has a shrouded hammer, and double-action trigger mechanism. One particularly unusual element to the gun was its safety lever, which functioned to actually remove tension from the hammer spring when engaged. Ultimately, it appears that 200-300 were made for evaluation by various groups, but no contracts resulted. The pistols that were made saw little or no combat use, and were often brought back as souvenirs by occupying American soldiers. This example is a very early one, serial number 13.

The most common Japanese pistols used during World War II were the Type 14 and Type 94 Nambu designs, by a huge margin. However, there were a number of other handguns used in small numbers, and today we're looking at two of those. The first is the Sugiura, essentially a copy of the Colt 1903 made under Japanese supervision in China. Some 6000 or so of these were made, including production which continued for a time after the end of Japanese occupation. The second is the Inagaki, which was a domestic Japanese design not copied from anything else. About 500 of these were made in .32 ACP before production stopped to convert the design to 8mm Nambu. The 8mm Inagaki pistols were not successful and never went into serial production, though. The first 500 made were used by the Imperial Japanese Navy and as pilots' sidearms, where compactness was more important than terminal ballistics.

After he failed to win US military adoption of his toggle-locked rifle design, John Pedersen went looking for other countries that might be interested in the gun. One of these was Japan, which experimented with toggle-locked Pedersen rifles and carbines for several years in the early/mid 1930s. This particular one is serial number 8, and has a scope mounting rail attached to it. It functions like a normal Pedersen rifle, but has a rotary magazine instead of the en bloc clip used in the US trial and British-produced rifles.

The ZH-29 was the brainchild of noted Czech arms designer Emmanuel Holek in the late 1920s. It was one of the earliest practical and reliable semiauto rifles available, although Holek and the Brno factory were unable to secure any large orders for it (the three known orders total about 500 rifles, for China, Lithuania, and Ethiopia). Several other countries tested the rifle (including the United States), but none adopted it. The ZH29 was a long-stroke gas piston operated rifle with a tilting bolt which actually pivoted sideways into the left side of the receiver to lock. This design choice led to some unusual geometry to the gun, as the barrel is mounted at an angle to the receiver, so as to be perpendicular to the breech face when the bolt is in its locked position. Manufacturing quality was excellent on these rifles, and they all display a very pretty plum patina today. This particular example has no magazine with it, but my understanding is that ZB26 LMG magazines are a perfect fit.

. Colonel Jean Alexandre LeMat was a native Frenchman who emigrated to the United States and in 1856 secured a patent for a "grapeshot revolver", which had both a 9-shot .42 caliber cylinder and a 20-gauge smoothbore barrel acting as the cylinder axis. A moveable striking surface on the hammer allowed the user to alternate between firing the rounds in the cylinder and the center shotgun barrel. Unable to find a manufacturer in the US, LeMat had them manufactured in Belgium. These revolvers achieved most of their current notoriety as a result of several thousand being used by the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War - and those guns were percussion ones. However, LeMat also made a smaller number of pinfire variants for sale in Europe (where pinfire cartridges were much more common than in the Americas). This LeMat revolver is one of the pinfire examples, which still has a 9-shot cylinder and retains the percussion mechanism for the center smoothbore barrel. It comes in its original case, with several tools including a mold to make an interested 3-part segmented slug.

There isn't much I can say about this one, as I have no idea who made it or when. What I can tell is that it is a blowback action with a rather unique "rocking block" type of bolt and what appears to be a clock style coiled flat spring for the hammer.

In the years after WWII, several countries experimented with general-use optical sights on service rifles. The Germans had pioneered the concept with the ZF-41 long eye relief optic during the war (and the ZF-4, to some extent), and the British actually adopted the EM-2 with a permanently-mounted 1x optical sight in 1951 (only to un-adopt it almost immediately in favor of the FAL). The US also tinkered with the idea, as demonstrated by this 1x optical sight on an M1 rifle for sale at Rock Island. I was unable to find any reference information on this type of sight, but it does seem to fit the period. Perhaps one of our readers will recognize it?

John Pedersen was one of the more prolific and successful gun designers in American history, having even been described by John Moses Browning as "the greatest gun designer in the world". And yet, many people only know about Pedersen from his unsuccessful toggle-locked rifle or his WWI Pedersen Device that never saw action. In truth, Pedersen's work included a number of very successful sporting rifles and shotguns that many shooters would still recognize today. While looking through the guns at Rock Island on my most recent trip there, I realized that they had examples of virtually every one of Pedersen's guns - so I figured I should do an overview of the man's work.

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 not many were made. This particular one has a rather interesting feature of a second magazine latch location to act as a disconnect, firing single shots with the magazine held in reserve.

The most common Japanese sniper rifle of World War II was the Type 97, essentially a Type 38 Arisaka rifle with a 2.5x telescopic sight mounted to the side of the receiver. About 22,000 of them were made in total (a smaller number of Type 99 sniper rifles were also made). The scope on the Type 97 was zeroed at the factory, and had no external adjustments for windage or elevation. They were chambered for the 6.5x50SR Japanese cartridge, which produced virtually no smoke or flash from the long barrel of the Type or Type 97, making is a difficult rifle to spot (it also had a quite mild report relative to other contemporary weapons). Virtually all of these rifles in the US today have mismatched scopes, which generally means that they will not shoot to point of aim (this one's windage is way off). http://www.forgottenweapons.com

The G43 was intended to become the standard infantry rifle for the Wehrmacht (replacing the Kar 98k), but production never ramped up sufficiently, and the concept of the intermediate-caliber Sturmgewehr took over by the end of the war. Mechanically, the G43 uses a flap-locking system copied directly from the earlier Walther Gewehr 41 coupled with a gas pistol system derived from the Soviet SVT-38/40. Most G43s were significantly over-gassed when they left the factories, because reliable operation in the cold and mud of Russia was much more important than having a long service lifespan. This rifle has had its gas system replaced with a "shooter's kit" from Apfeltor, which reduces the gas system pressure to only what is necessary to run the gun in clean conditions. Without this modification, parts breakage is likely with extended shooting.

http://www.forgottenweapons.com/winchester-hotchkiss-1883-history-and-initial-impressions This is a quick video companion piece to my article today on the history of the Winchester Hotchkiss and my initial shooting impressions. Check out the link above if you'd like to learn more about these rifles!

The model 1898 Schwarzlose was a self loading pistol definitely ahead of its time. It was simple, powerful (for the period; it was chambered for 7.63mm Mauser), and remarkably ergonomic. It used a short recoil, rotating bolt mechanism to operate, and very cleverly had one single spring which did the duties of primary recoil spring, striker spring, trigger spring, and extractor spring. Why it failed to become a commercial success is a question I have not been able to definitively answer - I suspect it must have been due to cost. Edward Ezell theorizes that it was unable to compete with the Borchardt/Luger and Mauser pistols because those were able to be made with much more economy of scale. It is really a shame, because the Schwarzlose 1898 is the best of all the pre-1900 handguns I have encountered.

Many people don't realize that an extractor is not strictly necessary in many types of pistols - several early blowback models (notably the Bergmann 1896, as well as some later Spanish pistols) did not even have extractors. The residual chamber pressure after the bolt opens is often sufficient to push the case out of the chamber. In 20th century extractor-less pistols, one will usually find a tip-up barrel, to give the shooter a way to manually remove an unfired cartridge. At any rate, the Schwarzlose 1898 in today's video does have an extractor, it simply wasn't working 100% in our shooting session. Two particular shots that seemed to function normally in real time turned out to actually be extractor failures when I reviewed the high-speed footage, and I thought they would make an excellent case study.

Patrick Ferguson was a British inventor and Army officer who developed a breechloading flintlock rifle in the 1770s (his patent was granted in 1776). He impressed British Army ordnance officials with a remarkable demonstration of the gun's speed and reliability, and was granted permission to organize an experimental unit of 100 marksmen armed with his rifles to fight in the American colonies. They first saw action at Brandywine, with indifferent results (100 men out of 30,000 redcoats would be hard-pressed to dramatically impact the outcome of a battle no matter how advanced their weapons). Ferguson himself was seriously wounded in the battle, and the unit was disbanded while he convalesced, never to be reformed. The Ferguson rifle was not the first breechloading flintlock, but it was the first that was made to military standards and formally used in combat. The major innovation of Ferguson's was to machine his breech threads so that a single revolution of the breech would open it enough to reload (instead of requiring multiple revolutions). A rate of fire of 6 shots per minute or better was easily possible for a well-drilled shooter, and this from a weapon with the accuracy of a rifle. Other weapons at the time required choosing between the accuracy of rifling or the loading speed of a smoothbore. The Ferguson offered both - actually being faster than a smoothbore to reload, and allowing that operation to be done prone, behind cover to boot. So why did the Ferguson disappear from use after Brandywine? The most immediate reason was the death of Ferguson himself in 1780 at the Battle of King's Mountain. His direct and personal advocacy was the driving force behind its use, and there was nobody to replace him in that role. In addition, the Ferguson rifles were necessarily much more time consuming and expensive to manufacture. Equipping the entire British Army with such weapons was simply not feasible financially. http://www.forgottenweapons.com

People often ask what the final prices were for the items in my auction videos. So, here are the hammer prices for the guns from the March 2015 James D Julia auction. Note that a couple items did not sell, which could mean that they didn't reach the consignor's minimum reserve price, or other technical problems, buyers backing out, etc. These prices also do not include the buyer's premium fee (typically 15% of the bid price).

Here are the hammer prices for the guns from the April 2015 Rock Island Premiere auction. Note that several items did not sell, which could mean that they didn't reach the consignor's minimum reserve price, or other technical problems, buyers backing out, etc. These prices also do not include the buyer's premium fee (typically 15% of the bid price).

Mauser's classic early pocket pistol began as the model 1910, in .25 ACP caliber (6.35mm). It was then re-engineered for the larger .32 ACP (7.65mm) cartridge in 1914, and a final set of modifications too place in 1934. It is a simple blowback mechanism, with disassembly rather different from most other blowback pocket pistols.

I have been spending this past week at the Rock Island Auction Company. I posted a few photos on Facebook, and had someone request a video. Well...why not? So I put together a brief tour of the place. This coming auction will have about 6,500 guns for sale, and that makes for some pretty impressive racks of guns to browse through looking for good video subjects. :) For the record (since I'm sure people will ask), I'm not an RIA employee, and have no direct financial incentive in the sale prices of any of their guns.

The mitrailleuse was one of the early types of mechanical machine gun, along with the Gatling, Gardner, Nordenfelt, and others. "Mitrailleuse" was originally a general name for a volley gun - one with many barrels in a cluster, which are fired sequentially (it now means heavy machine gun). The two most common types were the Montigny (a Belgian design fired by a lever) and the Reffye (a French design fired by crank). The Reffye was a top-secret weapon used by the French in the Franco-Prussian War, which was expected to be a huge game-changer. However, there was little experience worldwide in how best to use a weapon like this, and the French commanders chose to use them like artillery, firing at long range where they were inaccurate and underpowered. In this role, they were utterly outclassed by the Prussian Krupp artillery, leading to a general European disdain for the effectiveness of machine guns that would last until the First World War. This Reffye is a reproduction, here shown firing blanks. The footage comes to us courtesy of Julien Lucot, a writer for the French arms magazine Cibles. Thanks, Julien!

During WWI, the German army issued about a half million sets of trench armor, often called grabenpanzer or sappenpanzer. Despite common belief, this armor was not intended for trench raiding - in fact, German orders regarding it specifically prohibited this use because of the amount of mobility lost when wearing it. Instead, the armor was for sentries and machine gunners. These were soldiers who tended to be stationary and easily targeted, and the armor was intended to help protect them. American testing after the war suggested that it could stop a rifle bullet at 400-500 yards. That would not be very useful in a trench raiding scenario, but for someone like an MG08 gunner under enemy machine gun fire from a distance, that could be enough protection to stop otherwise fatal hits. This set includes a set of the torso armor, plus a Stahlhelm, reproduction liner, and armored browplate as well.

The Bär pistol was designed as a compact gentleman’s defensive arm with a number of interesting features. These include twin barrels and a “cylinder” or chamber block, which held 4 cartridges in a single column, thus giving the pistol a smooth-sided shape easy to conceal while also giving it double the capacity of a typical double-barreled derringer. Some were made in a proprietary 7mm cartridge, but this one (like most of them) is chambered for the .25ACP (aka 6.35mm Browning).

The Slocum revolver, designed by Frank Slocum and manufactured by the Brooklyn Arms Company, was one of the more successful workarounds for Rollin White's patent on the bored-through cylinder. The most significant advantage of Slocum's design was its use of standard .32 rimfire cartridges, unlike most other workarounds which used proprietary ammunition. Slocum did this by using a very clever chamber sleeve idea, in which the chambers are actually separate removable pieces that fit in the cylinder.

The Murata was Japan's first domestic manufactured military rifle. In its first iteration, it was an 11mm, single shot, black powder weapon and was adopted in 1880 (the Type 13). Before long, some problems in the design were discovered, and the Winchester company helped to resolve them. Winchester tooling was purchased by the Japanese government, and the improved Type 18 rifle was brought into service in 1885. A further and more significant modification would follow 4 years later as the Type 22. That iteration was reduced to an 8mm bore, and had a tubular magazine added - it would serve the Imperial Japanese military until the first Arisakas went into production.

Made in Naubuc Connecticut, the Hammond Bulldog was an interesting single-shot rimfire .44 caliber pistol. It used an unusual rotating breechblock, and had the potential to be a fairly strong action. Reportedly prototypes were made in a wide variety of calibers, including a carbine version with a wire-frame shoulder stock, but the vast majority were .44 caliber rimfire pistols like this one.

The Palmer was the first bolt action firearm adopted by the US military - it was a single shot rimfire carbine patented in 1863 and sold to the US cavalry in 1865. The guns were ordered during the Civil War, but were not delivered until just after the end of fighting, and thus never saw actual combat service. The design is very reminiscent of the later Ward-Burton rifle, using the same style of interrupted-thread locking lugs. The Palmer, however, has a separate hammer which must be cocked independently of the bolt operation.

Most people are familiar with the Type 38 Arisaka, which was one of the two very distinctive Japanese rifles of World War II (along with the Type 99). The Type 38 was an outstanding rifle in large part because it was the result of several years of experience and development which began in 1897 with the Type 30 "Hook Safety" Arisaka. This first Japanese smallbore military rifle was designed by a committee (led by Col. Arisaka) from the best elements of other rifles being made at the time. It used a bolt which was significantly more complex than the elegant Type 38 bolt which would follow later.

The Campo-Giro was Spain's first indigenous self-loading military pistol, adopted in 1912 to replace the Belgian 1908 Bergmann-Mars. Only a small number were made of the original M1913 variety, with the vast majority being the later and slightly more refined M1913/16. This particular example is an early one, and particularly interesting to look at for that reason. The gun is a straight blowback design in 9mm Largo, and only lasted as Spain's standard pistol until its descendent, the Astra 400, was adopted in 1921.

This particular Chinese pistol is a great example of all the elements of a proper Chinese Mystery Pistol: sights that don't function, gibberish markings, mechanical derivation from the Browning 1900, aesthetic elements form the C96 Broomhandle Mauser, and clearly handmade parts. However, it is a particularly high quality example of the type.

Ethan Allen was a very prolific gun manufacturer in the US, being involved with a series of different companies. This particular rifle of his appealed to me because it is an excellent example of how many different clever elements can be in something as simple and pedestrian as a single shot rifle. This particular one also happens to have a rather handsome brass frame - check it out:

A new set of videos will be starting next week, and one of them covers the family of three related Hungarian WWII rifles: the 35M, 43M, and G98/40. I figured that some folks would be interested in just a tutorial on their bolt disassembly without sitting through all the other material, so I decided to make the bolt section a standalone video for easy reference.

The Remington Model 8 is a sporting rifle designed by John Browning that first came on the market in 1906 (as the Remington Autoloading Rifle; the name was changed to Model 8 in 1911). It is a long recoil action, meaning that the bolt and barrel remain locked together as they travel more than the length of the cartridge. The locking system is a two-lug rotating bolt.

The Chassepot was the French answer to the Dreyse needle rifle, and also the only other needlefire rifle to see major military service. It was adopted in 1866 and served as a primary French infantry rifle until being replaced by the 1874 Gras rifle, which was basically a conversion of the Chassepot to use self-contained brass cartridges. The concept of a need rifle is that of a breech loading rifle using paper cartridges. A primer was set in the base of the cartridge (inside the paper), and upon firing the needle-like firing pin would pierce the paper cartridge and detonate the primer and powder charge. The system always had trouble with sealing the breech, but was still a significant improvement over muzzleloading rifles.

In 1855, Colt introduced a new revolver unlike the others in their lineup - it was a side-hammer design with the cylinder stops built into the axis pin instead of the cylinder. They then proceeded to scale the design up into revolving rifles and shoguns in several calibers. The revolving shotgun model was the least-produced, with only about 1300 made between 1860 and 1863. This example is in 10 gauge, and has five chambers in the cylinder.

There are rarely any truly original ideas in the gun world, and today's "pistol" ARs and AKs are not among them. Back in the 60s and 70s, companies were marketing the "Enforcer" M1, a pistol version of the WWII M1 Carbine. Of these two, one is made of military surplus parts by Iver Johnson and one made of new-production commercial parts by Universal.

We are used to German small arms being highly efficient and modern for their times, but the Reichsrevolver is an exception to that trend. The first centerfire adopted by the newly formed German empire, the model 1879 Reichsrevolver had traits we would typically associate with Russian arms rather than German. It was simple (too simple in some ways) and very durable, at the expense of not being very conducive to fast or efficient shooting. The Germans realized some of its problems, and in its initial form it only remained a standard front-line weapon until 1883.

It did not take long for some of the handling problems of the model 1879 Reichsrevolver to become apparent, and the result was a redesign to the model of 1883. These new guns retained the exact same lockwork was the 1879 pattern, but with a shorter barrel and redesigned frame and grip. The 1883 model revolver would serve as the German Empire's standard sidearm until the adoption of the P08 Luger, and was used by officers and enlisted men alike - although officers would often buy nicer models on the commercial market, such as the double action example in this video.

After the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Hungarian army was armed primarily with Steyr M95 straight-pull rifles and carbines, chambered in the 8x56mm rimmed cartridge. In 1935 they adopted a new Mannlicher turnbolt rifle, the 35M, which used the same 8x56R ammunition and en bloc clips. The rifle was modified in 1940 for production to German specifications as the Gewehr 98/40 (including conversion to 8x57 rimless ammunition and a stripper-clip-fed box magazine). The resulting rifle was good enough that it was adopted by Hungary as well in 1943 as the 43M.

While US infantry forces during the Civil War had only limited access to the newest rifle technology, cavalry units adopted a wide variety of new carbines in significant numbers. Among these were a design by Benjamin Joslyn. It first appeared in 1855 designed to use paper cartridges, but by the time the US Army showed an interest Joslyn had updated the weapon to use brass rimfire ammunition. The first version purchased by the government was the 1862 pattern carbine, of which about a thousand were obtained. Many more were ordered, but it took Joslyn a couple years to really get his manufacturing facility and processes worked out. By the time he had this all straightened out, the design had been updated again to the 1864 pattern, addressing several minor problems with the earlier version. Ultimately more than 11,000 of the 1864 pattern carbines were purchased by the Union, chambered for the same .56-.52 cartridge as the Spencer carbines also in service.

When the Spanish Civil War erupted, the Nationalist/Fascist forces quickly captured all the major arms production factories in the country. This left the Republican forces dependent on arms importation and the creation of new factories. The two major efforts to make weapons in Republican-controlled areas resulted in the Ascaso (named after an Anarchist martyr) and RE, both copies of the Astra 400.

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 be used in either semiauto or pump action mode, and it was also sold in a pump-only variant as the Model M. While this variant sidestepped the most significant parts breakage issues that plagued the Model G, it was a poor competitor to the Remington Model 14 pump action rifle and failed to sell well enough to save Standard Arms from a quick bankruptcy.

The Moore patent "teatfire" revolver was one of the more (no pun intended) successful workarounds to the Rollin White patent. Designed by Daniel Moore and David Williamson, the gun was a 6-shot .32 caliber pocket revolver which used a proprietary type of cartridge. It was loaded from the front, and the rear of the case had a nipple in its center full of priming compound. This allowed the rear of the cylinder to only have a small hole through which the hammer could reach to hit the nipple and fire the round, as opposed to a rimfire design in which the whole rear of the cartridge had to be exposed at the back of the cylinder. Some examples, including this one, included a unique type of extractor for pushing out spent cases.

When the Germans occupied Norway, they took advantage of the arms production facilities at the Kongsberg Arsenal to make a number of Krag rifles to their own specifications. They were made with a mixture of new parts and existing rifles, and all retained the Norwegian 6.5x55mm chambering. The German features were elements like sights, sight hood, and bayonet lug that duplicated those of a Kar98k. Despite being made for two years, not many were actually completed - a testament to the Norwegian stubbornness against aiding Germany (Quisling aside).

When the Dutch military adopted the M95 Mannlicher rifle, they made a rifle for standard infantry, and a variety of carbines for specialist troops. these included artillery, cavalry, bicycle, engineers, and colonial service carbines. During World War I they attempted to standardize these and reduce the number of different designs, but met with only limited success. By the time World War II began, there were at least 13 different variants of M95 carbine in service with the Dutch military.

The Khyber Pass is a region near the Afghan/Pakistan border known for firearms production - particularly for very crude guns made with crude tools. This particular pistol is an excellent example - it looks like a Colt 1911, although it is smaller and more akin to a .32ACP Llama. It is a straight blowback action, and mechanically is actually much more similar to a Spanish Ruby.

(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 opportunity to doing any shooting with it. I put off the editing of that video for a while, and then happened to have a chance a week ago to do some shooting with a registered full-auto Sudanese contract AI AR-10. They aren't the same gun exactly, but very close. So when I put this video together, I added in that shooting footage, so we could have the complete package. Enjoy!

I had a cool Swiss viewer named Bjoern kindly send me this footage of a Swiss LMG25 machine gun firing - thanks, Bjoern! These guns are very rare in the US, and the only one I've been able to handle was in Europe. If I can ever get my hands on one myself, I will make some video with my Edgertronic high speed camera, but this footage is a great look at the gun until that is possible. If you are not familiar with the LMG-25, you should check out my overview video of the gun from a couple years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD3o1KkLeiM

In 1936 or 1937, the BSW company (Berlin-Suhler Waffenwerk) produced a small number of prototype pistols for German Army trials. These trials were eventually won by the Walther P38, and for good reason in this case. The pistol BSW submitted was a gas-accellerated blowback design, with an aluminum frame, stamped slide, 13-round magazine (in 9x19), and double-action-only shrouded-hammer firing mechanism. I had the opportunity to try shooting one of the 3 surviving examples of this pistol thanks to the generosity of a reader named Steve (thanks, Steve!). This is one of those cases where it seems that the trials board evaluating guns made the right conclusion - this pistol was finicky to disassemble, quite large, and had harsher than normal recoil because of its light weight, high bore axis, and blowback mechanism. Its 13-round magazine was a nice touch, but one of very few positive elements in the gun.

Today's slow motion video is a Mauser Schnellfeuer; the full-auto version of the C96 pistol made in the 1930s. Just over 100,000 of these were made, with the great majority being sold in China. It is chambered for 7.63mm Mauser, firing at 1120rpm (using Prvi Partisan ammo) from 10- and 20-round detachable magazines.

The Walther MP was an all-stamped submachine gun developed in the late 1950s, and available in long (MPL) and short (MPK) versions. It is an open-bolt, blowback design, but uses a somewhat innovative bolt in which most of the mass is located above and in front of the chamber, to reduce bolt travel and receiver length. I found it to be a very pleasant gun to shoot, and I suspect it was largely unsuccessful in large part due to the superior marketing skills of H&K with their MP5 submachine gun.

Even the legendary Elmer Keith started out as a total newbie to shooting and reloading, and blew up a gun with wildly dangerous handloads in 1923. I got my hands on the remnants of the cylinder from that gun, and I think we can learn a couple important things from it... Thanks to James D. Julia for giving me the chance to have a look at this cool artifact!

The Remington 870 is one of the most popular shotguns ever made, but some trap shooters decided they preferred the lighter recoil of the gas-operated Model 1100. This gave someone at Remington the idea to replace the 870's magazine tube with a gas piston much like that in the 1100, which could act simply as a recoil reducing mechanism. Since formal trap shooting did not use the magazine anyway, it seemed that there would be nothing to lose. This gun was introduced in 1981 as the 870 Competition, but proved to be a commercial failure - only 5500 were sold and it was discontinued soon after. They really do shoot softer than a standard 870, and the guns have developed a cult following today among aficionados.

The Scotti Model X (the X standing for the 10th year of the Italian Fascist era, or 1932) was one of a bunch of semiauto rifles tested by the Italian military during the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Scotti entry into these competitions was chambered for the 6.5mm Carcano cartridge and used standard 6-round clips, identical to the Carcano bolt action rifles. It also used sights basically identical to Carcano rifle sights. Where it was rather unusual was its open-bolt action, which is typically only used in machine guns. Open bolt means that when the rifle is ready to fire, the bolt is locked all the way back. Upon pulling the trigger, the bolt moves forward, picking up a cartridge, chambering it, firing it by means of a fixed firing pin, and then extracting and ejecting the spent case and locking open again, ready for another shot. This system can be used with either locked or blowback actions, and the Scotti X uses a two-lug rotating bolt to lock during firing.

Take heart, lefties! We can still run bolt actions with gusto! (Filmed just for kicks at the range, on my phone)

Switzerland was an early adopter of the Luger pistol as a standard military sidearm, but by WWII that design was becoming obsolete and the Swiss began looking for a newer sidearm. Several lines of development were pursued, and we have examples of two of them here: the W+F Bern P43 and the SIG P44/8 (the /8 designates the single stack 8-round magazine; there was also a double stack P44/16 made). These are both mechanically Browning short-recoil tilting barrel pistols, but they do show some significant differences, particularly in the trigger mechanisms. The P44 was developed from Charles Petter's MAS 35A pistol adopted by the French, and it would go on to become the P47 (aka SIG P210) and the winner of the Swiss handgun trials. As the P210, it is arguably the best quality service pistol ever adopted by any military.

It's fairly common today to see .22 caliber versions of larger firearms, marketed to folks who don't want to spend as much for either the gun or its ammunition. For example, the ATI Sturmgewehrs, the Beretta ARX-160, and the GSG AK and MP5 lookalikes in .22 rimfire. Well, it's not a new trend - very few trends are actually new. This is a .22 rimfire target pistol made by Francotte which was pretty clearly made to mimic the design of the C93 Borchardt.

The 32-round snail drum (or as it was properly known, the trommelmagazin 08) was developed in 1916 to give increased firepower to units armed with the LangePistole 08, or artillery Luger. These pistols were also used by stormtroopers prior to the introduction of the first submachine guns (which, incidentally, were also developed to use these drum magazines). The drums were generally discarded after the war, as submachinegun development with more typical stick magazines made them obsolete. Today they are fairly rare and valuable, and quite interesting to use. The mechanism inside the snail drum actually uses two discreet mainsprings - one a typical coil spring in the stick portion and the other a flat clock spring in the drum. The lever on the back is used to tension and un-tension the clock spring, and as a result it moves as the drum is fired, until the cartridges stored in the drum portion itself are used up. At that point the coil spring takes over, feeding the remaining rounds in the box portion of the magazine.

The Czech Samopal vz. 26 was one of a family of submachine guns (the vz 23-26) that pioneered the use of bolts telescoped out forward over the barrel, allowing guns to have much better ratios of barrel to receiver length than before. The guns actually have quite a few interesting mechanical details, although in my opinion they fail to make it a particularly desirable gun for actual shooting.

After a long day of doing video, things sometimes just get goofy. The gun is a 13mm Mark I Model B Gyrojet Rocket Carbine. No sights because it's more low-drag that way.

Mike Krause of San Mateo, California makes some gorgeous reproduction Luger pistols, including copies of the extremely rare .32ACP "baby" Lugers. Unfortunately, we didn't have much luck with this particular one on the range. Still, I figured it would be of some interest to watch a couple malfunctions happening in slow motion.

Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons Check out The Great War's complete playlist here for your easy binge-watching enjoyment: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB2vhKMBjSxMK8YelHj6VS6w3KxuKsMvT I have been really enjoying The Great War series, so I figured I ought to take advantage of an opportunity to look at several WWI heavy machine guns side by side. This is a video to give some historical context to the guns, and not a technical breakdown of exactly how they work (that will come later). These really were the epitome of industrialized warfare, and they wrought horrendous destruction on armies of the Great War. The guns covered here are the German MG08, British Vickers, and French Hotchkiss 1914. Other heavies used in the war include the Austrian Schwarzlose 1907/12, the Russian 1905 and 1910 Maxims, the Italian Fiat-Revelli, and the American Browning 1895. The book I was quoting from towards the end was Dolf Goldsmith's unmatched work on the Maxim, The Devil's Paintbrush.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The ASP was a custom take of the S&W Model 39 autoloading pistol developed by a man named Paris Theodore in the 1970s. Theodore made a wide variety of sneaky James-Bond-like guns for various clients, but is best know for the ASP. At the time, it was one of the best options for a subcompact pistol in a full-power pistol cartridge (9x19). In addition to cutting down the slide and grip and dehorning the whole gun, the sights were replaced with Theodore's proprietary "guttersnipe" sights to provide a very fast (and "accurate enough") sight picture for close quarters shooting. When Theodore sold his business in the late 70s, it was purchased by folks who continued to make the ASP pistols in Wisconsin, where this particular one came from.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Pretty much every major military had an antitank rifle in service when WW2 kicked off, and the British example was the Boys rifle, named after the Captain Boys who designed it. It was a bolt action .55 caliber rifle with 5-round detachable magazines. If was obsolete by 1943 and replaced by the more effective but equally unpleasant PIAT.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Bergmann was one of the reasonably successful yet relatively unknown manufacturers of early automatic pistols. Originally a delayed blowback patent purchased by Bergmann, the design was refined and simplified by none other than Louis Schmeisser into the 1896 Bergmann, in three different calibers (5mm No.2, 6.5mm No.3, and 8mm No.4). Its evolutuion would continue into a locked-breech design using the more powerful 9x23mm cartridge and the later variations would see use as late as WWII.

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 worldwide - after only about 16 PB rifles they made some changes and started making the improved PA model instead (the two main improvements being the use of a reversible clip and the addition of a mechanism to allow ejection of a partially-full clip). Anyway, in addition to Alex and myself, we were joined by Nathaniel F (a TFB writer) and Patrick R (from the TFBTV video channel). Between us we put about 60 rounds of original 1920s wax-lubricated Frankfort Arsenal .276 Pedersen ammo through the rifle.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons 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 operated manually with a bolt handle like a bolt action Mauser. Four companies tried to get into the resulting rifle trials, but only two were able to build good enough guns to get contracts for field trials. These were Walther and Mauser. Walther ended up winning the competition (largely because they ignored several of the RFP requirements) and their rifle became the Gewehr 43. Mauser stuck to the requirements with their Gewehr 41(M), and it cost them the competition.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Belgian Army held rifle trials in the late 1880s to choose a new infantry rifle, and the winner was the Model 1889 Belgian Mauser. Quite a few different guns were involved in the competition though, including this Engh-patent rifle made by Liegeoise. It's a pretty unusual bolt action that is definitely worth taking a closer look at!

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Colette was a Belgian gun manufacturer that made this interesting parlor pistol. It used a rocketball type of cartridge, in which the powder and primer were encased in the hollow base of the bullet to make a caseless cartridge. The gravity pistol was named for its gravity feed mechanism and its 20-round capacity. Because of the very limited powder capacity of this type of cartridge, these pistols were made solely for sporting and recreational use, without an attempt at military adoption.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Have you heard of Jonathan Browning, gunsmith and inventor? Among his other accomplishments, he is credited with designing the harmonica rifle in the US - and we have an example of one of his hand-made guns here to look at today (made in 1853). Browning was a Mormon, and spent several years slowly moving west periodically setting up gunsmithing shops before he reached his final destination of Ogden, Utah. There he settled down for good, and had 22 children with his 3 wives. One of those children also showed an aptitude for gunsmithing, and formally apprenticed to his father. You might recognize his name...

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Lindner carbine was an early US cavalry carbine used during the Civil War. Unlike the many metallic cartridge firing carbines that would follow, it was a breechloader that used .58 caliber paper cartridges. An initial order for 892 of them was delivered to the Army, and Lindner went on to make some improvements to the design. By the time his improved version was ready, the paper cartridge had been rendered obsolete by metallic cartridges, and the Army was no longer interested in the guns. To avoid having to purchase them, they refused to send an inspector to Lindner's factory, thus ensuring that none of the guns would pass inspection. A slimy but legal way out of their contract, as the ensuing legal battle was decided in favor of the government and Lindner had to sell his extra guns in Europe.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Merwin & Hulbert company was a short-lived firearms manufacturing partnership between designer Joseph Merwin and the Hulbert brothers as financiers. Merwin wanted to design a particularly strong and high-quality revolver, and he succeeded - his guns are arguably some of the best revolvers of the frontier era. The company made a wide variety of designs, but in this video I will be sticking to just the Frontier and Pocket Army models. Of particular note is the very clever unloading mechanism!

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons 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 was simply an M14 with a pistol grip stock, bipod, forward grip, and bipod. While it was more effective in automatic fire than the standard M14, it was significantly inferior to the M60 (no surprise there). A total of just 8350 were made.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons Germany was the first country to produce a purpose-built antitank rifle, in response to the major Entente tank attack at Cambrai. The design was pretty simple, basically a scaled-up Mauser 98 with 4 locking lugs chambered for the massive 13.2mm TuF cartridge. It would perforate about 20mm of armor plate at 100m, which was nicely effective on WWI tanks. By the end of the war more than 15,000 had been made. Interestingly, a bunch of them ended up at Springfield Armory, where they were used in the development of the .50 BMG cartridge.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Sylvester Roper is not a well known name in firearms history today, but he made a number of notable contributions to the field - in addition to his work with motorcycles and automobiles where he is much better remembered. The Roper revolving shotgun was an early cartridge-firing repeating shotgun that could carry and fire four rounds without reloading. It was offered in both 12ga and 16ga (this one is 12ga) and used a rather unusual open-bolt mechanism. Cocking the hammer fully would bring a shell into position between the bolt and chamber, and firing the gun would cause the bolt to drop forward, chamber the cartridge, lock in place, and immediately fire. Re-cocking the hammer would extract the fired case but leave it in the rotary magazine, and then bring a new shell into position to be fired. As a result, one could fire four rounds and then would have to unload the 4 empty shells form the magazine carousel before reloading. Roper would go on to share the patents for the first pump action shotgun with Christopher Spencer (better known for his lever action rifle used in the Civil War) before his ultimate death on a steam-powered velocipede (we all have to die eventually, and that was a cool way to go!).

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The FN Model 1903 was a Belgian-made scaled-up version of John Browning's model 1903 pocket hammerless pistol. The pocket hammerless was made in .32 ACP and .380 calibers for (primarily) the civilian market in the US by Colt, and the FN model was chambered for the more powerful 9x20mm Browning Long cartridge, with military and police contracts in mind. The most common source of the FN pistols in the US is from the Swedish contract for the guns, but they were sold to a number of other nations as well. This example is from the Russian contract, which included shoulder stocks with the pistols. Many military automatic pistols from this time were offered with the option of combination holster/stock units, which could be used to provide improved accuracy to the shooter. The stock for the FN 1903 is a bit different than most, in that it requires the use of an extended 10-round magazine instead of the standard flush-fit 7-rounder. As with most such original guns, these have been specifically exempted from NFA regulation in the US.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons 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 that without the huge pressure of standard cartridges, a rocket-firing gun could be made far lighter and cheaper, as it had no need to contain pressure. The rockets would accelerate down the barrel as their fuel burned (and the 4 rocket jets would be angled to put a spin on the projectile for accuracy), and the weapon would actually have the most kinetic energy at something like 20 yards downrange, when the fuel was expended. A decent number of Gyrojet handguns were made and sold (mostly as curiosities), but intrinsic accuracy problems prevented them from ever being taken seriously as weapons. The company behind the guns (MB Associates) went out of business shortly, unable to fully exploit their full range of ideas. One of those ideas was a carbine variant of the gun. A few hundred were made in two different models, and we have the chance today to take a look at one of the Mark 1 Model B sporter-style carbines.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Like most countries, Germany had a standard-issue antitank rifle when World War II began - the Panzerbuchse 39. It fired an 8x94mm cartridge with a small very high velocity armor-piercing bullet. And like the other AT rifles from the 1930s, the PzB-39 became obsolete quickly as tank armor improved during the war. However, while most countries simply scrapped their antitank rifles, the Germans opted instead to convert the guns into dedicated grenade launchers. Because the PzB-39 was already designed for a very high pressure cartridge, it was ideally suited to handle the stresses of firing large anti-tank grenades. Rather than relying on simple kinetic energy to penetrate, the grenades could use shaped charge technology to be vastly more effective than AP bullets. In converting the PzB-39 into the GrB-39, the barrels were cut down, grenade launching cups attached to the muzzles, new sights designed for grenade use, bipods lengthened, and the folding stocks were fixed in place. Most of the PzB-39 rifles in service were subject to these modifications, and the resulting GrB-39 guns were able to be reasonably effective through the end of the war.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Menz Liliput is one of the smallest functional firearms ever put into mass production. It was offered in 4.25mm (.17 caliber) in addition to the more popular .25ACP and .32ACP. The 4.25mm cartridge is used generated about 17 foot pounds of muzzle energy - trivial by most pistol standards, but still several times that of the even tinier 2.7mm Kolibri. These pistols were made in the 1920s - some sources say from 1920 to 1927, but what I have found seems to point towards a commercial introduction in 1925.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Hotchkiss Revolving Cannon was developed in the 1870s as a competitor to the other manually-operated machine guns of the era, guns like the Gatling, Gardner, and Nordenfelt to name a few. What made the Hotchkiss stand out is that while the other guns were mostly built in rifle calibers, with larger options available, the smallest caliber Hotchkiss offered was 37mm. This was done because one of the primary applications for this sort of gun at the time was naval mounts to combat small torpedo boats. In that role, explosive projectiles were a major advantage, and international agreement restricted explosive projectiles to shells no smaller than 37mm. The Hotchkiss has a cluster of 5 rotating barrels, but only a single bolt. It would chamber, fire, extract, and eject once with each full rotation of the hand crank, and it would hold the barrels stationary while the round was fired. The multiple barrels allowed a manual action to fire at a high rate, and also prevented barrels from overheating during extended firing. This particular Hotchkiss is a modern-made reproduction, scaled down to use .50 BMG brass. However, the action of the Hotchkiss is not strong enough to use modern smokeless powder, so this can only be fired with black powder .50 BMG handloads.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Wesson & Leavitt is one of the scarcest revolving rifles made in the US, with no more than 50 made (some sources say only 16). The reason for this is that the Dragoon revolver which Wesson & Leavitt based the rifle on was found to be in violation of several Colt patents. Most importantly, when the Wesson & Leavitt Dragoon was introduced in 1850, Colt had a patent on the feature of having the cylinder index automatically when the hammer is cocked. They filed suit against Wesson & Leavitt, and won the case in 1851, before very many of the revolvers had been made.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Type 96 and Type 99 Nambu light machine guns were arguably the best LMGs used by any nation during WWII - they were light, handy, accurate, durable, and reliable. Designed by Kijiro Nambu to replace his 1922 Type 11 LMG (which was fed by a unique hopper mechanism using 5-round rifle stripper clips), the Nambus are often mistaken for copies of the Bren gun. In fact, the mechanical operation of the Nambus is quite distinct from the Bren; they simply share an external resemblance. The Type 96 was adopted in 1936 and was chambered for the 6.5x50SR Japanese cartridge. This relatively light cartridge allowed the gun to be smaller and lighter than many contemporary LMGs. All of the guns were made with rails for detachable optics, and used 30-round box magazines. In 1943 production of the 96 ended, as it was being replaced by the Type 99. The 99 was basically the same gun but chambered for the larger 7.7x58 cartridge. The biggest difference between the two was the barrel changing mechanism. The Type 96 had a simply lever to throw to release the barrel, where the 99 has a nut to tighten the barrel down to the receiver. In addition, the 99 barrels had to be headspaced to specific guns with thin washers, whereas the 96 barrels were universally interchangeable. This change was made to reduce machining cost on the barrels, although it is often misunderstood today as being some sort of adjustable headspace device.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Warner carbine was another of the weapons used in small numbers by the Union cavalry during the Civil War. It is a pivoting breechblock action built on a brass frame. These carbines were made in two batches, known as the Greene and Springfield. The first guns were chambered for a proprietary .50 Warner cartridge, which was replaced with .56 Spencer in the later versions (for compatibility with other cavalry arms). This particular Warner shows some interesting modification to its breechblock, which has been converted to use either rimfire or centerfire ammunition. This was not an uncommon modification for .56 Spencer weapons, as the centerfire type of Spencer ammunition could be reloaded (unlike the rimfire cartridges). With this modification, the firing pin can be switched from rimfire to centerfire position fairly easily.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons When we think of James Paris Lee, we usually think of the British family of Lee-Enfield rifles. However, the US Navy actually adopted an early version of Lee's action before the British, in 1879. In addition, this rifle was the first use of the detachable box magazine, a patented invention of Lee's. Lee initially took his design to the Sharps company, because Remington (where he did have ties form previous firearms endeavors) was trying to push the tube-magazine Remington-Keene rifle into military service. Lee's design was founded on an attempt to improve upon the tube magazine, and Remington did not want to divide its efforts at that time. The superintendent of the Sharps company at that time was Hugo Borchardt, and he was able to devise an effective way to manufacture Lee's box magazine. The Navy's 300 guns were put into production, but Sharps fell into bankruptcy before they were completed. By this time, the Army had rejected the Remington-Keene, and Lee was able to interest the company in his rifle. He took the partial receivers from Sharps over to Remington, where the rifle order was completed and delivered. More sales would follow, and Remington would slowly improve the rifle bit by bit. Tomorrow, we will take a look at the 1885 model...

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The model of 1885 (a modern collector designation; Remington called these the "Remington Magazine Rifle" and did not differentiate between the different versions) was the final iteration of James Paris Lee's bolt action rifle made by Remington. It incorporated a number of improvements from the earlier versions, including a relocated bolt handle, improved bolt head, and a magazine that could now hold cartridges securely without the use of a sliding catch at the nose. These rifles were made in .45-70 caliber for US use and in .43 Spanish for export sales. The US Navy purchased most of the .45-70 guns that were made, and this particular rifle is one of those Navy guns. By the time these rifles were actually in production, Great Britain had also decided to adopt the Lee system in 1888, which would go through several iterations and ultimately become the iconic SMLE that would be the mainstay of British infantry during the First World War.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons 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 these were made, at the end of the Vickers-Pedersen production run. The mechanism of the Pedersen carbine is identical to that of the rifle, the carbine simply has a barrel about 2 inches shorter and a cut down stock. These would have been used by cavalry units or by sportsmen wanting a slightly lighter and handier rifle. It certainly does look like a sporterized rifle, but this is the correct original factory configuration.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Before 1934, there was no legal restriction on short-barreled shotguns, and several companies offered pistol-style shotguns for personal protection. One of the best of these was the Ithaca Auto & Burglar. These were made mostly in 20ga, but could also be ordered in .410, 16ga, or even 12ga. They were basically a short version (typically 10" barrels) of Ithaca's standard SxS shotgun action with a special stock intended to be held like a pistol. The stock changed style in 1925, when Ithaca made some changes to the shotgun action as well. The early stocks had a small wooden spur that was reportedly fragile and prone to breaking. This replaced with a more squared-off looking design for the remainder of production. Production and sale of the Auto & Burglar (and the other guns like it) ended abruptly in 1934, when passage of the National Firearms Act placed a massive tax on their sale or transfer. The guns had already been expensive at $40, and the NFA tax added on an addition $200 to that (this would be changed to $5 for AOWs in 1968). Obviously, nobody was going to legally purchase one of these with a 500% federal tax, so Ithaca stopped making them.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pancor-jackhammer-video-trip/ I have been offered a chance to do a video on a real live example of a Pancor Jackhammer - one of only a couple examples in existence. I would love to do it, but it requires me to fly cross-country for just this video and I simply don't have the budget to do that. So, I am running an IndieGoGo campaign to fund my travel costs. If enough folks are interested in getting a look at this gun, I will be able to make it happen. I may or may not be able to shoot it - I am still waiting to get confirmation on that one way or the other from the owner. So I can't promise firing footage, but I can promise history and complete disassembly.

Well, my flights are booked and everything is set for my trip to do a video on the Pancor Jackhammer. Thanks, guys! I am blown away by how fast you guys funded this...and that people continue to contribute to it despite being over 200% funded at this point. The extra funds left after the trip will all be going to other neat video projects... Thanks!

Like what you get from Forgotten Weapons? Please consider supporting me on Patreon! http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The High Standard Model 10A and 10B were a pair of bullpup police shotguns produced for about 10 years in the late 1960s and 1970s. They were built around a regular High Standard semiautomatic shotgun action, which was put into a plastic chassis to give it a bullpup configuration. They were chambered for 12 gauge, 2 3/4 inch shells, and required high-brass or other full-powered ammunition to run properly. The idea of the bullpup layout really did have merit for the purposes High Standard intended, although the guns were not executed as well as they could have been. In theory, the short overall length made the guns very handy for using in and around patrol cars, and the ability to effectively hold and fire the gun with only one hand would allow an officer to use his other hand for things like opening doors, moving obstacles, handling objects, etc. The integrated flashlight (molded into the chassis on the 10A and detachable on the 10B) differs from today's tactical weapons only in that traditional Mag-Lite type lights (specifically, the Kel-Lite) were used instead of today's smaller and more powerful options. The carry handle, folding front sight, flashlight mount, rotating buttplate, and very non-traditional appearance made for quite the eye-catching gun when these weapons hit the market. Many police departments purchased them with the idea of modernizing, only to find them less practical in reality than in marketing, and they went out of production by the late 1970s.

Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons The Pancor Jackhammer was a select-fire combat shotgun designed by John Anderson in the 1980s. He was a Korean War veteran who had used a pump shotgun in combat, and while he liked the shotgun concept, he felt there must be a more efficient way to make a shotgun than a single-loading pump action. The tinkered with ideas and designs, and ultimately devised the Jackhammer. It is a remarkably clever and interesting mechanism, combining mechanical elements from the Mannlicher 1894, 1895 Nagant revolver, and the Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver. After making several dozen mockups out of wood and clay to get the mechanics just right, Andersen built a fully functional prototype, which is the gun you see here. It used a lot of large cast parts (and weighed a fully 17.5 pounds), and had a very slow reloading process. However, it proved that the concept was valid and it worked reliably. Anderson then made two more with much lighter materials and a much improved reloading mechanism. These two guns were submitted to the US military for testing, and both were ultimately destroyed by HP White Labs in destructive tests. The testing proved very positive (the guns survived a 50,000 round endurance test), but were ultimately rejected by the military. The first prototype was kept personally by Anderson, and is now the sole existing Jackhammer. It was owned for several years by Movie Gun Services, which rented it to a number of film, video game, and comic book companies. Because of this and its very distinctive appearance, the Jackhammer has made appearances in a vast number of comics and video games. Thanks to the folks who kicked in to my IndieGoGo fundraiser to help me make the cross-country trip to film this gun! I was not able to shoot it for liability reasons (the owner was not present and the gun most recently sold for $135,000), but I hope you will enjoy getting an in-depth tour of how

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The M1915 CSRG, commonly called the Chauchat after its primary designer, has a reputation as the worst gun ever put into military service. That reputation, however, is not deserved. It was not a great weapon, but it was a very serviceable gun for its day. The French needed a light automatic rifle *right now*, and needed it in large numbers. The Chauchat answered that call, and was used to great effect by many French soldiers. The Chauchat's poor reputation comes from a couple places, some justified and some not. First off, many US troops trained on M1918 Chauchats built in .30-06, which were poorly made and pretty darn bad guns. They were replaced by 8mm Lebel guns before going into combat, but the bad experiences of training stuck with many Americans. The biggest mechanical flaw in the Chauchat was its magazine. All automatic weapons are heavily dependent on good magazines, and the Chauchat used a magazine that was made of thin metal, easily damaged, and open on the sides for dirt and mud to enter. If the magazines were not treated well, the gun would become hopelessly useless. In addition, many of the Chauchat guns in the United States today were deactivated at one time, and often badly reactivated. This has nothing to do with their original reliability, but it does a lot to perpetuate their reputation. This particular example is an original gun that does not appear to have ever been deactivated, and it ran flawlessly for me. It will be an excellent example for someone who can appreciate it!

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons By the beginning of 1945, the Nazi government in Germany was looking to find cheaper ways to equip the Volksturm, and solicited bids and designs from several major arms manufacturers. The Steyr company created a crude but effective version of the Mauser 98 which was dubbed the VK-98 or VG-5. Mechanically it is identical to a K98k, but has much less attention paid to aesthetic finish and many simplified parts. In total, 10,000 of these Steyr rifles were made. Despite commonly held notions of them having totally random parts, there are actually a relatively small number of discreet variations in the production sequence and the rifles have definitely class characteristics - which I will examine in the video.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons 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 (among other things) the Holek Automat. Mostly in 8mm Mauser and 7mm Mauser, the Automat did not prove to be much of a commercial success, although this is certainly due in part to it being manufactured during WWII, when the market for expensive sporting rifles would have been understandably thin. However, the gun is very cleverly designed, and extremely simple to disassemble.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons There was not much industrial production the the Confederate States of America during the US Civil War, and Confederate-made revolvers have been very collectible for a very long time. Today we're taking a look at three such revolvers made by a series of companies that evolved throughout the war. Specifically, a Leech & Rigdon, a CH Rigdon, and a Rigdon & Ansley. All three are mechanically copies of the Colt 1851 Navy, as are most Confederate revolvers, but they have some distinctive features. In addition, by looking at all three together we can see some of the changes that took place as the war progressed.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Adler is a unique little pocket pistol built in pre-WWI Germany.Not much is known about it, as only about a hundred were manufactured and they failed to be a commercial success. The design is a simple blowback one, using a proprietary 7.25mm cartridge. However, the disassembly method is pretty neat, and the pistol handles quite well. This particular example is the best condition one still known to exist.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons In the mid/late 1960s, Colt was manufacturing AR-15 rifles and wanted to supply light machine guns to go with them - so they developed the CMG-2 ("Colt's Machine Gun"). The CMG-2 competed against the Stoner 63 in trials for the Navy SEALs (among others), and narrowly lost out. It was a very well designed and thought-out weapon, but not *quite* as good as the Stoner. A few years later in the early/mid 70s, Colt brought the design back in response to a request for a belt-fed 7.62mm machine gun for special operations units. Something with the firepower of the M60 was desired, but in a lighter package. Colt took their CMG-2, scaled it up to 7.62mm NATO caliber, and redesignated it the CMG-3. A total of 5 guns were made, and they went into military testing. Unfortunately for Colt, the design wasn't quite as simple to scale up as they had hoped. The CMG-3 was determined to have a service lifespan of about 35,000 rounds - a third of what was required. Around that point, the receivers would fracture at the front trunnion. By the time Colt had worked out a new design to strengthen the guns without adding too much weight, the contract opportunity had passed, and the improved version was never made. Of the five guns originally made, I believe only two still exist. This one is serial number 1, and I was privileged to get permission of the consigner to test-fire it on camera. In my opinion, it is a fantastic gun. At only about 18 pounds it is remarkably light for a 7.62mm beltfed, and quite simple to shoot from the shoulder. As with the SMG-2, it's internals are a parade of clever elements.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Bren Ten is an interesting story of handgun development and business failure. The gun was first developed by Dornaus & Dixon, with the consulting help of the iconic Col. Jeff Cooper. It was intended to be a handgun to improve upon the venerable 1911 in every way. To satisfy the adherents to the theory of large-caliber handgun cartridges, the gun was designed around a new 10mm cartridge designed by Norma. This cartridge would propel a 200 grain bullet at 1200 fps from a 5 inch barrel, making it the most powerful service handgun cartridge in production. It would use a 10-round magazine, and also be convertible to .45ACP. The gun itself was based on the excellent Czech CZ-75 (made at Brno, which is where the "Bren" portion of the pistol's name came from). It had full length slide rails, a DA/SA trigger that could be carried cocked and locked, and nice big sights. Unfortunately, a combination of production quality problems, inadequate magazine design, preorders, and other issues led to the company quickly falling into tough financial straights. The guns were only manufactured for about 2 years before bankruptcy ended production. Some had been shipped without magazines, and Bren Ten magazines remain a sought-after commodity today.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons During World War One, Birmingham Small Arms (aka BSA) grew into a massive arms manufacturing facility to supply the previously inconceivable military appetite for rifles. When the war ended, they were left with a bit of a dilemma. As a private entity, what were they to do with such a huge production capacity and no more government orders? One part of their post-war plan was to create and market a new line of handguns and ammunition in conjunction with a conglomerate of ammunition manufacturers. The result was a line of new belted cartridges including a .34 caliber belted round roughly equivalent to the .32 ACP. To use this cartridge, BSA designed a pistol, which was mostly a copy of the FN 1910. The hope was that a good marketing campaign centered around the state-of-the-art new ammunition would make for a popular product and many sales. Unfortunately for BSA, the plan was a flop. Belted ammunition was new and innovative, but thoroughly unnecessary for blowback handgun cartridges. The new guns never went past the prototype stage, and only three are known to exist.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons I really don't have much I can say about this one - beyond it being made in Paris by Lefaucheux, I don't know anything about it's history or development. I do know that I have never seen another shotgun with this type of action, though...

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Type 89 grenade discharger, commonly known as the "knee mortar" was a Japanese light infantry weapon introduced in 1929 which blurs the lines between grenade launcher and mortar. Like a mortar, it fires propelled explosive bombs in a high-angle indirect fire role, but it has a rifled barrel and uses a range adjustment mechanism very different from most mortars. The knee mortar proved to be a very capable and effective weapon in WWII against US forces. It was accurate, effective, and perhaps most importantly, light and very fast to put into action. The closest comparable US weapon was the 60mm light mortar, which had a more effective projectile but was significantly slower to use. Of course, the "knee mortar" nickname was based on the theoretical belief that one was supposed to rest the curved baseplate of the weapon on a leg while firing, which would actually have resulted in a broken leg. The baseplate was curved to allow it to dig into soft soil and be used against objects like logs and roots.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Confederate States of America didn't have very much capacity for manufacturing small arms, and was happy to purchase guns from anyone who could make them. Among others who got into the gun-making business during the Civil War were the Dance brothers of Texas. They only managed to produce between 325 and 500 guns during the war, but they did have a formal contract from the CSA and their pistols are a bit more distinctive than most Confederate arms.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons As World War One stagnated into trench warfare, snipers and machine guns quickly proliferated, and exposure above the parapet of one's trench could be extremely hazardous. This leaves one with the question of, how to shoot back without risking a bullet? One answer that was devised was to mount a rifle to a periscope. That way the rifle could be lifted up to get a clear shot at the enemy trenches while the shooter remained safely out of sight using mirrors to see his sights and a length of wire to pull his trigger. While all the major powers in the war developed devices like this, the one we are looking at today is German. It's simple, but effective. In addition to the trench periscope stock, this rifle has also been fitted with a couple other WWI modifications. It has clamp-on luminous sights to allow more accurate shooting at night, and also an extended 25-round fixed magazine to give the shooter much more ammo to fire before needing to reload. The rifle also comes with another neat accessory, which was not fitted for the video. This particular trench stock is a factory-made item, but does not include a mechanism to cycle the bolt - a shooter would have to bring the rifle back down after each shot. Some more complex versions were made which included articulated levers for cycling the bolt from below. The range of trench stocks also goes the other direction, and includes plenty of examples that were handmade in the trenches by individual soldiers...where necessity was the mother of invention. However, trench stocks of any type are quite rare to find, and they made very clumsy souvenirs for troops coming home.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Note: I made a typo in the designation of this camera in the video title card; it should say MKB-1000. With the advent of aircraft, marksmanship instruction gained a huge new element of complexity. Now there were gunners firing at rapidly moving aerial targets from the ground and worse, gunners in moving aircraft shooting at other moving aircraft! Classic shotgun sports were often used to train gunners to lead flying targets, but that wasn't deemed sufficient by all countries. What was desired was a way for an instructor to actually see a student's sight picture while firing. The solution to this need was to build cameras which duplicated the handling characteristics of aircraft machine guns. The gun camera we are looking at today is an MGK-1000, which is made to simulate an MG-15 Luftwaffe machine gun. It is a movie camera, and each frame of film has a crosshair superimposed over it as well as an image of the vane sight's position at the time the frame was exposed. This allows an instructor to see a record of exactly where the student was "shooting" and determine what corrections need to be made. In addition to the camera functions, the MGK-1000 has elements intended to duplicate ancillary machine gun functions. For example, the spring that powers the camera is contained in a magazine body, and is weighted to duplicate the weight of a fully loaded magazine. The spring allows the camera to run as long as a 75-round drum would take to fire, at which point the trainee must swap it for a new "magazine" to continue "firing".

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Mannlicher 1894 is one of a small number of firearms designed with a blow-forward action, and also the first of these guns. It was the creation of Ferdinand Mannlicher, a brilliant and prolific Austria inventor who is also responsible for the en-bloc clip concept, very early experimental semiautomatic rifles, and a line of turnbolt and straight-pull rifles used widely throughout Europe. The 1894 was made only in small numbers - about 100 each in 6.5mm and 7.8mm (this one is in 6.5mm). They were tested by the US military as well as other nations, but not adopted by anyone. While they were bleeding-edge new technology at the time, they were also really not better than traditional revolvers from a practical military perspective. That doesn't prevent them from being a fascinating cul-de-sac of firearms development though!

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons 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. This particular rifle came just shortly thereafter, and uses a quite strong and safe long recoil action coupled with a 2-lug rotating bolt. Long recoil designs are fairly unusual in firearms, and this one has an interesting feature of a bolt handle which disconnects the barrel recoil spring when used (rather like Mauser's Gewehr 41(M) rifle, in fact). The design reportedly had persistent problems with extraction and ejecting, unfortunately, and Mauser would drop it for other designs. At some point after its testing was finished, this rifle was sporterized with a cut-down stock and express-style sights (it was originally made in full military configuration). While unfortunate, that does not change the fact that it is an extremely rare example of a Mauser experimental rifle.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons 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 never saw large-scale production. Mechanically, the gun is an evolution of his 1896/1901 automatic pistol and the 1901 carbine made from that pistol. It locks using a short recoil action and a tipping bolt, and was initially made in 7.63mm Mannlicher (dimensionally identical to 7.63mm Mauser but slightly less powerful). One of the shortcomings of the 1901 carbine was that the handguard was fixed to the recoiling barrel, so that a firm grip on the handguard would cause the gun to malfunction. The 1901/04 variant of the carbine fixed that issue by connecting the front handguard to the trigger frame, which did not move during cycling. The most significant change of the 1901/04 design, however, was its size being scaled up to use a larger 7.63x32mm cartridge (sometimes misidentified as 7.63x45mm, as it's overall length is 45mm). Ballistics for this cartidige appear to be lost, but the .30 Carbine (7.62x33) would appear to be very similar in size (although the Mannlicher case is slightly bottlenecked rather than straight). It retained the same 6-round magazine capacity as the earlier Mannlicher carbines, but a larger magazine could easily have been made. Development was ended because, alas, Mannlicher perished in 1904.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The 1880s saw a brief explosion of experimental manually-operated repeating handguns, mostly throughout Europe. The most common weapon of this type known in the US is the Volcanic pistol, forerunner to the Winchester lever-action rifles. In Germany and Austria, however, a bunch of different guns of this type were developed. The one we are looking at today is a Berger, dating from 1880/1881. Unlike most of these guns, it could be described as a double action mechanism - a single rearward trigger pull runs the complete loading/firing/ejecting cycle. In most manually operated handguns, the rearward pull loads and fires, while a forward push of the trigger extracts and ejects the fired case (much like a lever-action rifle).

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons When the Massachusetts Arms Company initially produced the Wesson & Leavitt Dragoon revolver, they quickly incurred the wrath of the colt company. Those initial revolvers violated several Colt patents. The resulting lawsuit forced the end of production of the Dragoons, and the company decided to redesign the guns to avoid the Colt patents. The result was this .31-caliber belt model revolve,r as well as a similar .28 caliber pocket model. To make the guns legal, the hammer was no longer connected to movement of the cylinder. Instead a release button was located inside the trigger guard. After firing, the user would press this to release the cylinder and then manually rotate it to the next chamber. In addition, the metallic cap priming was replaced by a Maynard tape system (used under license, unlike the Colt patents!). Not more than about a thousand of these revolvers were made, as they were obviously technically inferior to the Colt guns of the time. However, the small sales, combined with other guns, were enough to hold the Massachusetts Arms Company above water financially until 1857, when the Colt patents expired.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Did you know that the Peters company made ammunition specifically for riot control for the Thompson submachine gun in the 1920s? And it wasn't rubber bullets, either - it was paper-wrapped snakeshot. The cartridges were actually longer than a standard magazine would accept, necessitating the production of a special longer magazine to fit them. That magazine would hold 18 rounds, and was specially marked as such. I took a look at a lot of 200 rounds of this ammo and one of the special magazines, and was curious how it would actually pattern. Well, the Peters riot ammo is rare and expensive, but we also had some WWII-vintage .45ACP snakeshot on hand and I was able to try shooting some of that. At about 8 feet it made a pattern about 18 inches in diameter (from a rifled Tommy Gun barrel), and did not cycle the action. It was only after filming that I discovered the proper way to use this ammo for crowd control: fire it into the pavement in front of the crowd, allowing it to ricochet up into the crowd at a lower velocity. It would be less lethal that way, but still a great way to lose an eye!

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons When the US entered WWII, submachine guns were in short supply and high demand. Much of the production of Thompson guns was being purchased by the UK, and what guns were available to the US military went first to the Army. In accordance with long tradition, the Marine Corps were secondary to the Army in receiving new weapons. However, the formation of a Marine paratroop unit in particular necessitated the Corps finding *some* sort of suitable submachine gun. What was available at the time were Eugene Reising's M50 and M55 guns, being manufactured by Harrington & Richardson. The guns were chambered for the standard .45ACP cartridge and used a delayed blowback action which allowed them to be significantly lighter than the Thompson. The M50 had a full-length traditional stock, while the M55 used a pistol grip and wire folding stock. Mechanically, the two variants were identical. The M55, which is what we have today, would up being specifically issued to tank crews and paratroops, where its compactness was a significant advantage. The Reising developed a quite bad reputation in the Pacific for a couple reasons. Its parts were not always interchangeable between guns (a deliberate choice to speed up manufacture, which troops were not necessarily aware of), its mechanism was more susceptible to fouling than other military small arms, and its disassembly procedure was far too complex for military service. However, these issues did not prevent it from being quite successful and well-liked as a law enforcement weapon in civilian police use after the war. Thanks to that negative wartime reputation, Reisings are some of the least expensive military machine guns available on the market today in the US.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Throughout the pre-WWI period, Paul Mauser was working continuously to develop a reliable self-loading rifle. Among his many experimental designs was a flapper-locked rifle. The flapper-locking system was first patented by a Swede named Kjellman, but his design (for a light machine gun) did not get beyond prototype form. Mauser made a military rifle using the system, and also scaled it down to handgun size as a potential followup to the C96 "Broomhandle" Mauser. That handgun was designated the 06/08, and used the same basic layout as the C96, with the magazine located in front of the grip. About a hundred were made, and they all used detachable magazines, with examples being made from 6-round to 20-round capacity. The action was a short-recoil one, locked by a pair of flaps inside the rear. The flaps would pivot out of contact with the bolt as the action recoiled, and then the bolt would be able to slide back between them (very similar to the Soviet DP/RPD/DShK lone of machine guns, actually). This example is a gorgeously refinished on, with a 20-round magazine.

The P08 Luger Pistol by S.I. Publicaties BV: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9080558354/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=9080558354&linkCode=as2&tag=forgoweapo-20&linkId=7ARG54W6LCCXMZI6 I have seen a lot of folks asking for information on Lugers, so I figured I should recommend a good book or two. There are a lot of books out there on Lugers, cutting across all levels of cost and quality. These two are the ones I keep myself and have found the most useful.

Today is our first Q&A video using questions from my awesome Patreon supporters (http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons). I am answering questions about: * H&K G11 (and caseless rifles in general) * Origins of clips and magazines * Firing a Japanese Knee Mortar * Union carbines from the Civil War * WWI aircraft gun technology * The worst gun design ever * Australian subguns - the Owen and F1 * Ideal guns for complete beginners If you enjoy this format, please let me know in the comments!

Final hammer prices (not including buyer's premium) on the guns from the September 2015 Rock Island Premiere auction.

You can see my full video on this rifle here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfhKLuPiXFc For folks who would like to just see the collected slow motion footage from the shoot, you are in the right place! This also features the one malfunction we had captured on high-speed footage.

The Helwan is a licensed copy of the Beretta 1951, made in Egypt. It is a single-stack, single-action 9mm pistol using the same basic locking system as the German P38. This design would later be renovated with a double-stack magazine and a double-action trigger mechanism to become the Beretta 92 eventually adopted by the US military.

A while back I had the opportunity to hit the range with Mike Carrick, Q&A Editor for Arms Heritage Magazine(a very cool magazine, by the way). The main purpose of the trip was to work with a reproduction Ferguson rifle, but Mike also brought along his hunting rifle. Well, one of them. Specifically, a 10-bore flintlock - a gorgeous copy of a 1790s British sporting rifle. So, I took the chance to ask him about it and touch off a round myself. The thing is a beast!

Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons The RPG-7 is pretty far from being a forgotten weapon, but I was not going to pass up an opportunity to take a closer look at a live one. This example is one of the few live and registered RPGs in the US, and it belongs to Movie Gun Services (if you saw Black Hawk Down, you saw it in use...). The RPG is a rocket-propelled shaped charge antitank weapon that took its philosophical foundation from the German WWII Panzerfaust (although it shares little with that weapon mechanically). Over the course of WWII, the armor on tanks quickly because too heavy for man-portable anti-tank rifles to defeat. The solution to this dilemma was the development of shaped charge warheads, in which directed explosive energy could be used much more efficiently than simple high explosive or even simpler kinetic energy. After several earlier developmental iterations, the RPG-7 was introduced in 1961 by the Soviet Union and would prove to be an extremely effective, inexpensive and simple weapon. Today they are found in virtually all third world conflict zones. A variety of rocket types have made them much more than a dedicated anti-tank weapon, and they will be found used against everything from personnel to aircraft. Russian-language version: https://youtu.be/hGqsFI4bYfg

Note: The Dance revolver price was adjusted after I compiled the video; it should be 67,500. Hammer prices (not including buyer's premium) from the October 2015 James D. Julia firearms auction.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons The Volkssturmgewehr Gustloff, more commonly (albeit incorrectly) known as the VG1-5, was one of the few semiautomatic Volkssturm weapons produced at the end of WWII. I have discussed these rifles before, but wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to take a close look at two more examples of the type. Mechanically the Gustloff uses a system quite unusual in rifles - gas delayed blowback. Chambered for the 8x33 Kurz cartridge, there are 4 small gas vent holes in the front half of the barrel which vent gas into a chamber in the front muzzle plug. Pressure in this chamber acts to keep the slide closed, thus delayed the opening of the action. A nearly identical system is used in the much later Steyr GB pistol. One of these in particular still has its original sling, which is a neat feature (the other clearly was issued with a sling but has lost it). In total 10,000 of these were manufactured, but they were not able to make a significant impact to prolong Germany's war effort.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The US National Firearms Act includes a category called "Any Other Weapon", which encompasses a variety of regulated weapons, including firearms which are disguised to look live other everyday objects, such as canes, and pens. R.J. Braverman, however, devised and patented a type of pen gun which the ATF concluded was not subject to regulation as an AOW. Braverman did this by designing a gun which had to be folded into a vaguely gun-like shape before it could be fired, thus negating its disguised look. The gun was called the "Stinger", and was sold in the 1990s in several calibers - .22LR, .22WMR, .25ACP, .32ACP, and .380 (although it was recommended not to shoot the .38-=0 much, as it could damage the gun's mechanism). While it was legally simply a handgun, the Stinger was pretty limited in its capabilities. It was a single shot device, and rather laborious to reload. It also featured an automatically-engaged safety and no sights. Still, if you wanted a gun that looked like a pen (or perhaps like a tire pressure gauge), the Stinger was definitely your easiest solution!

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Swiss military began experimenting with scoped sniper rifle during WWII, with the K31/42 and K31/43. These use periscopic optics permanently mounted to the side of the receiver, and were both found less than ideal. Experiments continued after WWII, and the periscopes were replaced with tradition style scopes on quick-release mountings. Eventually the idea of making the sniper rifles mostly parts-interchangeable with the standard K31 carbines was also discarded, and the ZfK-55 was adopted. It uses the same basic action as the K31, but only a few small parts can be interchanged between the two types of rifle. The ZfK-55 has a longer and heavier barrel, heavy stock, integral bipod, muzzle brake, and most unusual of all, the action is canted slightly clockwise. This was done to allow the optic to be centered over the barrel but still allow the use of standard 6-round charger clips to reload the rifle.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons If the Colt Paterson was the high-end classy choice for a sidearm in the mid-1800s, the Allen & Thurber pepperbox would have been the simple working man's alternative. While Colt was working for military contracts, Allen & Thurber ignored that market in favor of producing an affordable civilian sidearm in large volume. The basic idea of a pepperbox is like a revolver, but with the cylinder comprising a cluster of full-length barrels instead of just chambers lining up with a single barrel in turn. This made the pepperbox a simpler weapon to manufacture, as it did not have the precise alignment requirements of a traditional revolver. Allen & Thurber's examples were further simplified by having no sights and smooth bored, and being double action only. These were not the tool of professional gunmen, but they were simple, cheap (a quarter the cost of a Colt), and effective enough at close range. Allen & Thurber sold a huge number of them (exact numbers are not known, as they were not serialized) during the 1830s, 40s, and 50s and made a very tidy profit in the process. The end of the pepperbox came as metallic cartridges were becoming common place, as there was no easy way to convert the from muzzleloading to cartridge use, and cheap revolvers would take their place as the stereotypical working man's handgun.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Reifgraber, aka Union Automatic Pistol, is an interesting mechanical design from an inventor with an interesting personal background. Joseph Joachim Reifgraber was born in Austria in 1856, and emigrated to the United States at some point before the mid 1880s. He was a machinist by trade, and was clearly a political activist as well, in the mid and late 1880s, he published a German-language anarchist newspaper in St Louis, entitled Die Parole. He also served as delegate to at least a couple trade unionist conventions around the same time. However, his political activism seems to waned as time went by, and he began to take out patents on firearms development. He submitted both rifles and pistols to US military testing (not exactly the actions of a truly devoted anarchist...). His pistol design here is an unusual short recoil, locked breech action which was marketed by the Union Firearms Company of Toledo, Ohio. Interestingly, it was chambered for the rimmed .32 S&W revolver cartridge, and could be supplied with a second barrel for use with .32 ACP cartridges.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons Hugo Borchardt was a brilliant and well-traveled firearms designer. He was born in Germany but emigrated to the United States at a fairly young age, where he became engaged in the gun trade. He spent time working with Winchester, Remington (where he patented improvements on James Paris Lee's box magazine idea), and Sharps (where he designed the M1878 rifle and worked as Superintendent). With this experience under his belt, he returned to Germany and worked with the Loewe/DWM corporation. Borchardt's seminal invention in Germany was his C93 automatic pistol, which was the first of its kinds using a reasonably powerful cartridge and a locked-breech action. Unlike the other designs extant at the time, the C93 went into commercial production, and 3000 were ultimately made. The gun was safe and reliable, and it set the standard for locating a detachable box magazine in the grip, which remains the standard today. However, its very bulky mainspring assembly led to it being a rather awkward handgun to use (although it was a quite nice carbine when used with its detachable shoulder stock). Borchardt's talents came hand-in-hand with a fair amount of hubris, and he refused to consider the possibility that his pistol could be improved. Several military trials requested a smaller and handier version of the gun, and when Borchardt refused to make those changes, DWM gave the job to a man named Georg Luger. Luger was very good at taking existing designs and improving them, and he transformed the basic action of the C93 into the Luger automatic pistol, which of course became one of the most iconic handguns ever made.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Most everyone is familiar with the Luger pistol - it is one of the most iconic handgun designs ever made. Folks who have a passing interest in the guns will probably know about both the standard Army model (the P08) and the long-barreled Artillery model (the lP08, with its shoulder stock and snail drum magazine accessories). What a lot fewer people know about is the third major German military version of the Luger; the P04 Naval version. The Germany Navy was looking to replace its long-obsolete Reichsrevolvers at the same time the Army was, but while the Army was also dealing with the expense of adopting the new Mauser 98 rifles, the Navy needed far fewer pistols and had a budget on hand to buy them. They took the German Army and Swiss Army trials reports at face value and adopted the 1904 pattern Luger in 1904. These pistols had 6 inch long barrels (compared to the 4 inches on Army models), rear sights adjustable for 100 or 200 meters, and they came with shoulder stocks for making the guns into convenient carbines. They were purchased in batches starting in 1904 (although the first deliveries took almost 2 years) and running through the end of World War I.

Cool Forgotten Weapons Merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forgotten-weapons "Union" was a trade name used by French and Spanish arms manufacturers (as well as American, actually) - but this particular Union is a French example. Among their many variations of pistols available (25, 32, long, short, extended barrels, etc) was a fully automatic version. For that pistol, they also developed a 35-round "horseshoe" magazine to provide maximum capacity without overly hampering the gun's handling. These are extremely rare today, as not many were initially manufactured.

It's Halloween, so it's time for the Halloween Horror Shotgun match! I took a break from serious gun work and dressed up as Jesus, running the match with a Chiappa Holy Trinity (they call it a Triple Threat) three-barreled break action 12ga. A very fun time was had by all...check out the second half of the video to see some of the other shooters, including Elvis, a Teletubby, a bandito, werewolf, cowboy, and the Most Interesting Man in the World.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Franchi SPAS-12 (Sporting Purpose Automatic Shotgun) is a dual-action police shotgun produced in Italy between 1979 and 2000, and imported into the US until 1994. It can be operated either as a semiautomatic or a manual pump action, as a way to allow rapid semiautomatic fire with buckshot or similar ammunition but also function manually with lower pressure less-lethal types of ammunition (rubber slugs, beanbags, tear gas, etc). The gun was purchased by a decent number of law enforcement agencies, but it is far better known for its use in movies and video games, where its distinctive military styling makes it very popular with designers and prop masters. Still, there are a couple interesting elements worth looking at on the SPAS-12. For one thing, they were subject to a safety recall for a safety selector which could sometimes cause the gun to fire when being switched from safe to fire. And, of course, there is that hook thing on the stock. What's that for, anyway? I'll show you...

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Liberator is one of those interesting artifacts of WWII; an extremely simple single-shot .45 caliber pistol made by the boxcar-load (a million, specifically) with the intention of being dropped en masse across Europe to promote civilian sabotage against German occupation forces. They were manufactured by the Guide Lamp division of GM in record time - just 10-11 weeks for a literal million-gun production run. However, as they were being manufactured, shipped, and put into storage the motivation behind the project largely evaporated. British SOE ultimately decided not to distribute any in France, and only distributed a small number to partisans in Greece. In the US, the Army stockpile of Liberators was transferred to the OSS, and a fair number were actually distributed in India, China, and the Philippine Islands - although they did not ultimately have any measurable impact on the war effort.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons A while back I put together a video on the development of the Colt/Browning 1911 pistol, and one of the missing links in that video was the Model 1909. Well, one of the 23 Model 1909 pistols is up for sale in this next Rock Island auction, so I took the opportunity to look at it more closely. The 1909 is the point where many of the distinctive elements of the 1911 first appear, including the grip safety, push-button magazine release, and the swinging link, tilting barrel operating mechanism. However, it still retains several of the elements of the early Colt/Browning pistols, like the nearly vertical grip and the lack of a thumb safety. Given that only 23 were made (and by the time the Army was actually testing them, Browning was already busy on the improved 1910 version), they are not the sort of gun you come across every day...

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Colt Z40 was a collaboration between Colt and the then-relatively-unknown CZ firm. Colt was coming off two remarkably unsuccessful pistol launches in the early 1990s (the Double Eagle and the All American 2000), and needed something to offer in the duty pistol market. They arranged to sell a pistol made by CZ with a 1911-style grip combined with the excellent CZ-75 upper assembly and lockwork. The guns were chambered for .40 S&W because the recent 1994 Assault Weapons Ban had limited new production magazines to 10 rounds. However, after only 800 had been sold, Colt backed out of the deal and dropped the Z40 from its catalog. Why? Because they had happened to use a Z40 as the base gun for a model "smart gun", and the public reaction was overwhelmingly negative. In the aftermath, Colt management threw out the Z40 as the proverbial baby in the bathwater, simply because it had been tarnished by the PR of the smart gun debacle. CZ, for its part, made a few tweaks to the design (primarily replacing the DA-only lockwork with the DA/SA system for the CZ-75) and released it on their own as the CZ-40.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Madsen LMG is of particular interest to me because it is both a very mechanically unusual design and also a very early successful design. Madsen light machine guns were first used in combat in the Russo-Japanese War, saw use in both World Wars, and continued to be used by various forces (the Brazilian police being a notable example) until quite recently. Mechanically, the Madsen is a falling block type of action, which allows it to use a very short receiver (since there is no need for space for a bolt to travel forward and backward). Today I figured we would spend time pulling apart a live registered Madsen (a dealer sample, unfortunately) to examine its working parts.

From Reddit correspondent Oelund (https://www.reddit.com/user/oelund), we have this slow motion footage of M1 Thumb. No, I will not be doing my own version of this video. :) When closing an M1 bolt, always make sure to hold the bolt handle while pushing the follower down. The "official" way to do this is to use the right hand, and hold the handle back with the heel of the hand (fingers pointing down towards the ground) while using the right thumb to depress the follower. When in doubt, point your thumb towards the muzzle, as this will tend to make the bolt push your thumb up out of the action. If you grab the gun around the chamber and point your thumb towards the rear sight, you are much more likely to get it squished. Other rifles can also do this, most notably the Ljungman and Hakim - as they do not have handles directly connected to the bolt to hold onto and they have a rather unusual action that most people will not be immediately familiar with. For more discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/2hvk10/high_speed_footage_of_what_it_looks_like_when_you/

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons One of the competitors against the Garand and Pedersen rifles in the 1929 and 1930 US Army trials was the White rifle. White actually submitted two rifles, but only this gas-operated design was actually tested - and it failed to make enough of an impression to move on for further testing. However, White's gas system would come back 20 years later to be used in the M14 rifle.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons This toggle-locking rifle chambered for the .30-06 cartridge is the second of two rifles submitted by White for the 1930 US military trials. It was not actually tested by the US, but White did take it to the UK where it was tested in the early 1930s. British officials liked that it was a positively locked action (unlike Pedersen's toggle rifle, which was delayed blowback), but found it too fragile for combat use.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Along with his two semiauto rifle prototypes, when White went to England for rifle testing he took along a work-in-progress light machine gun. The weapon was trsted by British officials, but found wanting - largely because it was really not a weapon ready for testing. The "LMG" White built was actually semiautomatic only, although it fired from an open bolt. It used what appears to be an early iteration of the gas system which was much more refined in his selfloading rifle, and it included no provision for using a bipod or tripod (an essential element of a light machine gun).

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Did you know that the French Army issued more than 80,000 semiautomatic rifles during WWI? They had been experimenting with a great many semiauto designs before the war, and in 1916 finalized a design for a rotating bolt, long stroke gas piston rifle (with more than few similarities to the M1 Garand, actually) which would see field service beginning in 1917. An improved version was put into production in 1918, but too late to see any significant combat use. The RSC 1917 was not a perfect design, but it was good enough and the only true semiauto infantry rifle fielded by anyone in significant numbers during the war.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Colt 1847 Walker revolver was a massive 4 1/2 pound handgun made for Samuel Walker of the US Mounted Rifles (he also served with the Texas Rangers) as a way to equip mounted troops with greater firepower than single-shot carbines. The Walker was the first true martial handgun made by Colt, and despite its problems (nearly a third of the guns procured by the military would be returned to Colt for repairs, and more than a few literally blew up) it would save Colt from bankruptcy after the commercial failure of his Paterson revolver of 1836. Only 1100 of these guns were made, 1000 for the military and a further 100 for commercial sale. The military ones were issued to 5 companied of Mounted Rifles, and can be identified by their factory unit marks for Companies A through E (this particular gun is a Company A one). Roughly half of them were delivered in time to see active use in the Mexican-American War, but all of them would see use for many years later in the hands of the US military, the Texas Rangers, the Confederate military, and in civilian hands. The design would evolve into the Colt Dragoon revolvers and ultimately lead to the 1851 Navy and 1860 Army designs - arguably the most iconic muzzle loading revolvers ever made.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The "Plus Ultra" was a variation on the Ruby automatic pistol made by Gabilondo y Urresti (the original holders of the Ruby trademark) just shortly before they changed their name to Llama. The Plus Ultra was a scaled-up Ruby using double stack, 22-round magazines (still chambered for .32ACP). It offered much greater capacity than the standard pistols, and a few were actually made as select-fire guns. They never sold particularly well, though, and are rather uncommon today.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Today we are accustomed to seeing sub-compact 3.5" 1911 pistols for sale from a whole bunch of manufacturers - but this was not always the case. Making a really small 1911 actually run reliably is not a trivial proposition, as the slide velocity and spring force become very touchy, and small changes can have major repercussions. The first company to get the kinks out of the mechanism and bring an effective pistol to market was Detonics. Their MkI has a number of interesting features that were quite novel at the time.

https://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Thanks to the awesome people supporting Forgotten Weapons through Patreon for sending in more questions that I could get to for another month! I took on a whole bunch of them, on subjects including: * Browning lock vs others in handguns * Best modern weapon for WWI * Turret revolvers * Affordable "forgotten weapons" * Welrod pistol * C&R rifle parts sources * WWII souvenir? * Finnish firearms * Garage-built firearms that hit it big * What guns ought to be reproduced today? * My own background * Early striker-fired pistols And more! The TFB TV video where I explain why I don't like the G3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LU_emAFbXGI

The Model 1871 Mauser was adopted as the newly united Germany's first standard rifle, and it was a good design. However, it was a single shot rifle and soon it became apparent that the additional firepower of a magazine rifle was necessary to maintain military parity. A number of different conversion methods were tested by the German military , and ultimately a tube magazine under the barrel was adopted as the Gewehr 71/84. One of the other competing designs was this external wraparound magazine. It held cartridges outside the rifle, with a mechanism to kick a cartridge into the action's feedway when an empty case was ejected. While mechanically clever and probably reasonably reliable in sterile conditions, it has clear and serious disadvantages compared to a fully integral magazine like the type ultimately adopted.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Consider the problem of the pocket revolver of the 1860s. In order to be small enough to be reasonably concealable and comfortable to carry, it would typically be made in .31 caliber. That's not a lot of firepower...even back in those days when ballistics potency was rather less of a concern to buyers than it is today.But for the person who does want something more than 5 shots of rather small caliber, what is the solution? Well, John Walch came up with an idea. Superimposed charges were not a new idea, but Walch took that concept and applied it to the pocket pistol. The idea of superimposed charges is that you load two complete sets of powder and projectile into a single chamber, and then have two separate firing mechanisms so that you can fire the front charge first and then the rear charge. This had been used in flintlock rifles for example, but Walch used it to double the capacity of a 5-shot revolver to 10 rounds. His gun had two hammers and a single trigger, which would drop the hammers in the proper order. While to 10-shot capacity in a small package was a good idea, the gun suffered from some problems. If the rather long flash-tube to ignite the front charge in a chamber became clogged with black powder residue and the rear charge were then fired, the gun could explode. When it did work properly, it was even less powerful than a typical .31 caliber piece, as the double charges had to be a bit smaller than normal to allow space for both in the cylinder. The guns were used by one company of Michigan Infantry during the Civil War, but never sold very well. Interestingly, they were actually manufactured by Oliver Winchester and the New Haven Arms Company...

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Today we're looking an another early European micro-pistol. This is the Erika, developed by Franz Pfannl and chambered for the 4.25mm Liliput cartridge (which develops approximately 1/4 the energy of the .25 ACP). These pistols were actually carried for personal protection, under the theory that any gun was better than no gun, and that the presentation and threat of a gunshot would be sufficient to dissuade an attacker (or with the idea of using them on stray dogs, for example). Practicality aside, the mechanical internals of tiny pistols like this Erika are quite interesting to see, simple because of their minute size. Pfannl really was part gunsmith and part watchmaker...

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons As the US Civil War drew to a close, it was quite apparent to everyone that muzzleloading rifles were obsolete, and any military force wishing to remain relevant would need to adopt cartridge-firing weapons. However, the Union arsenals had a million or more muzzleloading rifled muskets still on hand. How to modernize the weaponry without simply throwing away all those existing guns? The task was put to Springfield Arsenal master armorer Erskine Allin in 1865, and he devised a "trapdoor" style of conversion to turn an old Springfield muzzleloader into a breechloader. He had the benefit of having seen the previous year's extensive trials of breechloaders, but the final product was his combination of what he judged to be the best elements of the ideas available. The result has long been known colloquially as the Trapdoor Springfield, and this 1865 model was the very first of them. It was still in .58 caliber, and used a rather complex extractor system. It would soon be revised to make improvements to it, and ultimately a .45-70 model became standard for US infantry and cavalry forces - and remained their standard until the adoption of the Krag-Jorgensen in the 1890s.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons When the United States entered World War One, there was no formal sniper school or training in place. However, the US Army had adopted a sniper optic for the M1903 Springfield rifle. It was the M1908 Warner & Swasey Musket Sight, a prismatic, 6x magnification scope. It was shortly updated to the M1913 configuration, and several thousand of each type were mounted to M1903 rifles, as well as M1909 Benet-Mercie light machine guns. Theseoptics were not particularly good by modern standards, as they were heavy and suffered from fogging and condensation (they were not sealed designs). However, they were the equipment available to the Army at the time, and were put to use. This particular example is a 1913 pattern scope with a locking ring from the earlier 1908 model. Perhaps the most interesting elements of the Warner & Swasey are the data plates affixed all over it, providing ballistic data for the .30-06 ball cartridge which was in use during WWI.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The German firm Heckler & Koch spent several decades building firearms all based on the same basic operating system: roller-delayed blowback (often called roller-locked, although they are not technically locked breech actions). The two best known worldwide are most likely the model 91 (aka the G3, in German Army service) and the MP-5. However, H&K also released a sporterized version of the HK-91 in an attempt to break into different aspects of the civilian firearms market. In fact, they made two sporting version, and these today are the SL-6 and SL-7, which were more or less "paramilitary" rifles chambered for the 5.56mm and 7.62mm NATO cartridges respectively. They feature a mix of civilian and military features...on the civilian side, they have small capacity magazines (3- and 10-round), sporting-style wooden stocks, and very nice triggers. On the military side, the retain the sling attachments and iron sights of the HK-91. Despite being relatively unknown in the US (where they were not available for very long, and also rather expensive), these H&K products are of excellent quality, and you will rarely find owners who are not very happy with them.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Swiss SIG factory was one of the earliest producers of semiautomatic military rifles, having produced the M1908 Mondragon rifles for Mexico. They continued to experiment with self-loading rifle designs, and in the mid 1920s came up with these two examples. They are extravagantly complex, and it is quite clear why they did not become production items - but they are fascinating to examine...

https://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons?ty=h Today I am taking a look at Savage automatic pistols as a general group. Savage produced about a quarter million pistols in both .32 and .380 caliber, divided between the models 1907, 1915, and 1917. What are the differences, and what was the timeline of their development? I'll go through all of this, and also some of Savage's memorable advertising and the basic disassembly process. This should answer all your questions about why some have hammers and some don't (actually, none of them have hammers, technically...) and what's up with those two different frame shapes.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Knoble in .45 caliber was one of the pistols in the US pistol trials of 1907. Unfortunately for Mr. Knoble, his pistol was deemed to crude for the Ordnance Board to consider even test firing, and it was dropped from the trial like a hot potato. Knoble only made a handful of pistols in total, and this is an example in .30 Luger caliber which is essentially identical in function to the .45 trials gun. it uses a short recoil, toggle locking system to operate, and is definitely a pretty crude piece of workmanship. Cool to take a closer look at, though! Русская версия: https://youtu.be/_pILUvONweE

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons In the US pistol trials of 1907 that eventually led to the adoption of the Colt/Browning Model 1911, the two strongest competitors to the Browning design were the Luger and the Savage. Luger declined the opportunity to participate in extended field trials, and so the two finalists were Browning and Savage. Savage had their original 1907 pistol, of which approximately 288 were manufactured. Fifteen of these were modified to a 1910 pattern to improve them, and then a further 5 pistols were made new for the final set of trials, to a third pattern (the 1911 model of the Savage). In this video were are looking at all three varieties, along with information on how the guns were later resold to the public, how to disassemble them, and how the function mechanically.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The USAS-12 is one of the few fully-automatic shotgun to actually be put into mass production, aside from Russian 12ga AK conversions. It was designed in the late 1980s based on the work of Max Atchisson and manufactured by the Daewoo conglomerate in South Korea. About 30,000 were made in all, mostly sold in Asia for police and military use. Importation of semiautomatic examples into the US was hindered by the Treasury Department determining them to have no sporting purpose, and thus to be legally classified as Destructive Devices under the NFA.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The N33 is one of a series of Swiss prototype semiautomatic rifles developed between WWI and WWII (the "33" refers to 1933). This particular design is interesting because it fires from an open bolt, a feature generally seen on light machine guns. An open bolt rifle typically is more difficult to shoot accurately because of the time between trigger pull and firing as the bolt travels forward to load a cartridge before firing it. The N33 was made in several calibers, but never went into any sort of significant production.

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons Manuel Mondragon was a talented lifelong gun designer born in Mexico. He worked extensively at the Swiss SIG factory, and was the man behind the first military-issue semiautomatic rifle. Before that, though, he designed this series of unique straight-pull bolt action rifles that featured a 3-position safety and "automatic" setting. Today I'm taking a look at 4 examples of these 1894 rifles, which allow us to see the two major variations in them. They differ in caliber, sight configuration, bolt design, and more...

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons/ Guns in museums get condemned to a purgatory behind glass. Guns in private collections get shot and broken. What are we to do?

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The Dror was an Israeli copy of the Johnson LMG, which was made domestically in Israel as part of Israel's war of independence in the late 1940s. The design was developed through a combination of reverse engineering a Johnson LMG (clandestinely, in a New York hotel room) and technical data leaked to the Haganah by sympathetic employees of the Johnson company. The first version was chambered in .303 British, but this was quickly replaced by an 8mm Mauser version (ammo Israel had significant stocks of at the time) using modified BAR magazines. Unfortunately, the Dror turned out to be rather unsuccessful in testing. Hopes were very high for it, and it was put into official production before field testing was completed - only to find that it failed many tests pretty badly. Ultimately it was used for training, but saw little or no actual combat use - the Bren and MG-34 were much more successful guns. This particular Dror is a semiauto rebuild provided by my friend Mark (thanks, Mark!).

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons The December 2015 Premiere auction at Rock Island just finished up this past weekend, so it's time for a quick recap to look at the hammer prices for the items that I had done videos on. As usual, these prices do not include the buyer's premium, which is typically 15% above the hammer price. Also, note that the Gewehr 71 with experimental magazine was pulled from the auction early for reasons unknown to me (probably RIA and the seller could not come to an agreement on pricing).