Antiques
Daly Arms “Tom Thumb” – A Tiny Ring-Trigger Revolver
The “Tom Thumb” is a tiny .22 rimfire revolver made in Belgium by an unknown shop and imported into the US to be sold by the Daly Arms Company of New York. These are antique […]
Video
Aircraft MGs
Maxims in the Skies: the German LMG 08/15
As soon as the MG08/15 “light” machine gun was adopted by Germany, it was recognized as an ideal basis for an aircraft gun. Weight was of the essence for WW1 aircraft, and a lightened Maxim […]
Prototype
The Rarest 1911: North American Arms Co
In the summer of 1918, the US government wanted to increase production of M1911 pistols, but all current manufacturers were working at capacity. So they looked to issue new contracts, and someone realized that the […]
Competition
‘Murican 2-Gun: M1918A3 BAR and M1911A1
Today I’m taking a brand new Ohio Ordnance M1918A3 semiauto BAR to the 2-gun match, along with a Tisas M1911A1 clone. The BAR is the WW2 configuration, but I followed the footsteps of many a […]
Heavy MGs
MG11: The Magnificent Swiss Maxim Gun
The Swiss were one of the first countries to test Hiram Maxim’s new automatic machine gun in 1887, and they found it far superior to their just-recently-purchased Gardner guns. The first Swiss maxims were delivered […]
Submachine Guns
Type 100 / 44 (Late Pattern) Japanese SMG
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 […]
Select-fire Rifles
M14: America’s Worst Service Rifle – What Went Wrong?
While the US never adopted a significant variation of the M1 Garand (excluding sniper models), testing continued on new iterations and features throughout the war. By the time the war ended, the US military had […]
Conversion
A Guns to Save Lives: Winchester 1886 Line Thrower
Line-throwing devices have long been an important part of maritime safety, and many different have been guns adapted to launch ropes from shore to ship or ship to ship. Usually they are inexpensive obsolete surplus […]
Semiauto pistol
Lugers in Thailand: The Siamese Artillery Luger
In 1936 and 1937, Siam purchased a batch of several hundred new Luger pistols for the Bangkok Police, including 100 long-barreled lP08 Artillery Lugers. These were new production gun, but made with surplus WW1-era barrels, […]
Submachine Guns
Chinese Type 50 PPSh: Founding “Gun City” in Manchuria
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 […]