Handgun - Forgotten Weapons

Maxim-Silverman .455 Caliber Behemoth of a Pistol

March 20, 2021 Ian McCollum 28

Hiram Maxim’s hired shop supervisor was a man named Louis Silverman. He was a skilled engineer, who was treated rather poorly by Maxim, and whose contributions were systematically understated. One of the most interesting projects […]

Colt’s Prototype Scaled-Down Model 1910 in .38/9.8mm

March 19, 2021 Ian McCollum 45

With the impending success of Colt’s program to develop new .45 caliber pistol for the US military (the 1911), the company began to look for ways to exploit the work that had gone into it. […]

Reiger Model 1889: Quick-Change Revolver Clips!

March 18, 2021 Ian McCollum 6

Edwin Reiger was an Austrian designer who took the basic mechanism of the Passler & Seidl ring trigger manual pistol and added a sort of revolver magazine to it. Reiger used a drop-in 6-round clip […]

Passler Model 1887 Ring Trigger Pistol – Now With Mannlicher Clips!

March 16, 2021 Ian McCollum 17

Franz Passler and Ferdinand Seidl formed a partnership to make manually-operated pistols in Austria in the late 1880s, but the arrangement did not last. Their design was initially patented by Passler in Austria, and then […]

Schouboe Model 1916: The Final Attempt

March 15, 2021 Ian McCollum 9

The final iteration of the Danish Schouboe pistol is this, the model 1916. Produced in prototype quantities only, it took the features of the 1910 pattern (safety and external barrel pivot) and made a few […]

Schulhof Model 1887 Manual Ring-Trigger Pistol

March 12, 2021 Ian McCollum 21

Josef Schulhof was the the first and most prolific designer of manually operated pistols in Austria in the 1880s. For a brief few years, there was a lot of developmental work done in this field, […]

Göring’s Platinum Lugers

March 5, 2021 Ian McCollum 28

There are a lot of guns out there attributed to German leaders and politicians of the Second World War. Many of these are completely specious, and many more are true simply because these men had […]

Uruguayan Celmi Hermanos .32 ACP Pistol

March 1, 2021 Ian McCollum 15

The Celmi brothers were Italians who moved to Uruguay and opened an arms factory. They are best known for sporting shotguns, but in 1943 they introduced an automatic pistol, much like the Walther PP but […]

Max Popenker on Russian Pistols and Ammunition: 7N21, 9x21mm, 9x18mm, and more

February 16, 2021 Ian McCollum 32

Today I am again joined by Max Popenker, Russian small arms historian and researcher. Max is explaining the basic history of Russian handguns and ammunition, starting with the adoption of the 7.62x25mm Tokarev cartridge to […]

Broomhandle Mauser “Red Nine” – the C96 in World War One

February 5, 2021 Ian McCollum 7

The German military did not actually adopt the Mauser C96 “broom handle” before World War One. It was the first really successful semiauto pistol, but the German military chose the Luger instead, in 1908. However, […]