Uncategorized
What Are Museums For?
We visited a number of major museums while we were in Europe – the Paris Musee de Armee, the Belgian War Museum, and the London Imperial War Museum in particular. Maybe I’m spoiled, but I […]
Articles by Ian McCollum
Semiauto Rifles
Shooting the Gustloff VG1-5
Edit: Sorry, guys! I managed to link to an unrelated video. It’s fixed now. 🙂 The Volksturmgewehr Gustloff (commonly and incorrectly called the VG1-5) was a last-ditch rifle developed by Germany at the end of […]
Artillery
Vintage Saturday: 2.95″ Vickers Mountain Gun
An American crew with a Vickers Sons & Maxim 2.95″ Mountain Gun in the Philippines. These were pressed into service against the Japanese as late as WWII…
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Nepalese Gahendra lineage
As you may recall, I picked up a Nepalese “Gahendra” rifle from IMA as a gunsmithing project, which turned out to be more complicated than I’d planned on. Well, I’ve been doing a bit of […]
Book review
Book Review: The Colt Model 1905
Today we’re looking at John Potocki’s excellent reference work, The Colt 1905 Automatic Pistol. Not much doubt what the subject is, right? The development of John Browning’s iconic 1911 pistol is generally not much discussed, […]
Prototype
Caseless ammunition demo action
The US Army (as well as other armed forces) has experimented with a bunch of interesting arms design ideas, and one that keeps coming back to the surface is the use of caseless ammunition. The […]
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Our Triumphant Return!
We’re back! We arrived in the US late last night from an absolutely outstanding three weeks in western Europe (France, Belgium, and the UK). We spent almost the entire trip visiting great collections and very […]
Heavy MGs
ABC’s of Machine Guns
Here’s another neat manual – A.B.C du Mitrailleu – the ABCs of Machine Guns. This was published in 1917 (the fifth edition, anyway) in French, and does a nice job showing all the most useful […]
Vintage photo
Vintage Saturday: Shivering with an AVS-36
Invading Russian never goes well, for any of the parties involved. These two certainly don’t look they’re having such a good time.
Bolt Action Rifles
1899 Remington-Lee Magazine Rifle
James Paris Lee is one of the less recognized prolific arms designers in American history, between the Lee straight pull rifle adopted by the US Navy and the British Lee-Metford and Lee-Enfield rifles. One of […]