Sometimes, it seems like there just isn’t enough innovation in the firearms world. Most firearms on the market today are the result of a century of product improvement, and the overwhelming majority of those that aren’t are designs that have roots going back three or more decades.

It takes a good hard look at a design like the Grant Hammond featured in the Forgotten Weapons video below to make one appreciate how sound – if boring – modern firearms are:

The Grant Hammond (a name which Ian notes is a bit incongruous with firearms naming convention, as it is the given and family name of its single designer) prototype seems to have everything for the experimental firearms addict. It’s a hand-built prototype, and probably a retrofit of an earlier experiment, still retaining many features that speak to it having had a different configuration in the past. It features an utterly bizarre operating mechanism – which could alternately be described as “hybrid blow-forward/blowback” or “long-blow-forward” – bringing to mind such utterly disparate designs as the Farquhar Hill and Hino-Komura at once. It has “gadget” features like the automatic bolt release and automatic magazine ejection that together with the weird mechanism make the pistol practically hypnotic to gun geeks.

This pistol is up for sale at the Rock Island Auction Company’s website, where it is Lot # 3333. Should one of our readers feel this pistol simply must be theirs, they can head over to that website for more information on how to bid. Good luck!