Submachine Guns - Forgotten Weapons

Sten Mk5: The Cadillac of the Sten Family

June 17, 2024 Ian McCollum 24

The Sten Mk5 (sometimes written Sten MkV) was really the Cadillac of the Sten series. It was designed in 1943, and featured a full wooden buttstock patterned after the No4 Enfield rifle, as well as […]

Sten MkIII: A Children’s Toy Company Makes SMGs

June 5, 2024 Ian McCollum 12

Lines Brothers was a company in the UK that made sheet metal childrens’ toys prior to the war. When production of the Sten guns began, Lines Bros was a parts subcontractor. Their engineers analyzed the […]

Romania’s AK-Based SMG: the LP7

June 1, 2024 Ian McCollum 2

Full cut with shooting segment in History of Weapons & War: https://forgottenweapons.vhx.tv/videos/lp7-smg-4k In the mid 1990s, UMC Cugir began looking at ways to adapt its AKM production tooling to make a 9mm submachine gun. What […]

Sten MkII: Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Simpler

May 29, 2024 Ian McCollum 28

The Sten MkI had barely been approved for production when the Sten MkII was born. Initially requested to produce a version of the gun suitable for paratroopers, in March 1941 Harold Turpin redesigned the front […]

Sten MkI & MkI*: The Original Plumber’s Nightmare

May 22, 2024 Ian McCollum 15

The Sten gun was designed by RSAF Senior Draftsman (sorry, Draughtsman) Harold Turpin in December, 1940. He sketched out a simple trigger mechanism on December 2, showed it to Major Reginald Shepherd the next day, […]

Madsen M50: From the Korean War to Star Trek

May 1, 2024 Ian McCollum 0

During World War Two, Madsen (DISA) manufactured a licensed copy of the Finnish Suomi (see: https://youtu.be/hjs1uiAIpNQ). When the war ended, they wanted to replace this with a more modern, inexpensive design of their own. The […]

How to Avoid the Legal Pitfalls of a Transferrable H&K Auto Sear

April 29, 2024 Ian McCollum 2

One of the particularly popular transferrable machine guns out there is the H&K auto sear. Since H&K grip and trigger assemblies are interchangeable between 9mm, 5.56mm, and 7.62x51mm guns (ie, MP5, HK33, and G3) a […]

M1 Thompson: Savage Simplifies the SMG

April 28, 2024 Ian McCollum 12

The Thompson submachine gun struggled to find a market when it was originally produced, with the first batch of 15,000 Colt-made guns not finally all selling until the late 1930s. By that time, the clouds […]

Type 100 / 44 (Late Pattern) Japanese SMG

April 17, 2024 Ian McCollum 41

The Japanese never really embraced submachine guns during and before World War Two. A series of development programs in the 1920s and 30s led nowhere, and there never really seems to have been much motivation […]

Chinese Type 50 PPSh: Founding “Gun City” in Manchuria

April 12, 2024 Ian McCollum 1

One of the first new weapons adapted and used by the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army after the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war was the Type 50, a copy of the Soviet PPSh-41. The […]