Ian McCollum - Forgotten Weapons

Book Review: Bullets and Bureaucrats

April 18, 2013 Ian McCollum 25

For a while now I’ve been following the rabbit hole of machine gun use in the second half of the 19th century – the days of the manually-operated machine gun (Gatling, Gardner, Nordenfelt, etc) and […]

Argentine Halcon SMG

April 17, 2013 Ian McCollum 8

We don’t have very much information on the Halcon SMG from Argentina, but we do have a training manual for the gun to make available. As best I can tell there were at least 5 […]

Brief Downtime

April 16, 2013 Ian McCollum 24

There will be a couple hours of downtime on the site today (or possibly tomorrow) – we are moving onto our own dedicated server. You may have noticed timeouts or slow service in the last […]

PSA: Removing Cosmoline (Video)

April 15, 2013 Ian McCollum 29

We have a bit of a departure from normal content today – I needed to clean up a really greasy C96 Mauser, and figured it might be useful for some folks to see the process. […]

Live on “America Armed & Free” Radio Today

April 14, 2013 Ian McCollum 23

I’m happy to announce that I will be live with Charles Heller on “America Armed & Free” discussing firearms history and whatever else the conversation wanders into today, from noon until 2pm, Arizona time. It […]

Daniels Rapid-Fire Carbine

April 14, 2013 Ian McCollum 19

We had a reader send us some photos of an odd submachine gun that he was looking for more information on. Well, it’s a new one to me – perhaps someone reading this knows more […]

Vintage Saturday: Brown Water Navy

April 13, 2013 Ian McCollum 19

Thanks to Beryl Barnett for the photo – the label on the back reads (translated from German): Flemish channels under the protection of the German Navy. Fast and armed boats are employed, which provide the […]

Mannlicher 1905 Experimental Self-Loading Rifle

April 12, 2013 Ian McCollum 26

Before we can really take a close look at today’s rifle, some background is necessary. Ferdinand von Mannlicher was a very successful Austrian gun designer, with patents on several major ideas, and successful rifle and […]

Book Review: French Military Weapons

April 11, 2013 Ian McCollum 6

Today’s book we have courtesy of Luc (thanks, Luc!) – French Military Weapons 1717-1938, by Major James Hicks. Originally written in 1938, it was reprinted by Flayderman’s in 1964. It’s tough to find today, but […]

Croatian Šokac SMG

April 10, 2013 Ian McCollum 36

Today’s gun was made quite recently, but also pretty obscure – I had not heard of it until Michael Heidler sent us this description and set of photos: Improvised firearms and mines dominated the early […]