This is a guest post by Zain from Pakistan The ‘Sporter’ cal .308 Winchester has been designed as a hunting rifle with the firing mechanism of G3A3 in semiautomatic mode. The accuracy of the gun has been enhanced with a freely floating extended barrel and a mil [Read More…]
Last weekend, I took the major arguments of Kalashnikov conspiracy theorists head on, and one of those – which I hear rather frequently – is why he did not design any other weapons besides the AK-47. The reason is… He did. Kalashnikov was a skilled and [Read More…]
Imagine an alternate universe in which Hollywood has spent decades making genre movies in which every single main character uses a Borchardt C93, and now factories are cranking out almost nothing but cast steel facsimiles of Borchardts to meet the demand based entirely [Read More…]
How can one balance the trade-offs inherent in ammunition design to create a true one-caliber infantry weapon system that is both effective and lightweight? This is a question I’ve been exploring for close to a decade, and writing about for over four years. The [Read More…]
The Glock 19, along with its close clones and equivalents, is in my opinion the ideal “universal” civilian pistol. Small enough to carry concealed, but large enough to shoot well, the Glock can serve equally well as an every day carry gun or as a home [Read More…]
The United States government has won a major firearms-related victory in Federal appeals court today, regarding claims of patent infringement by Liberty Ammunition, LLC. Liberty had claimed that the US Army’s M855A1 EPR and M80A1 EPR projectiles infringed on its [Read More…]
Modern? Sure, but let’s take a step back… Way back. It’s 1890 and smokeless powder has just been invented. There’s this guy named Rubin going around and spreading the gospel of the small caliber, high velocity .30″ bore round. You’re [Read More…]
Shouldn’t “Modern Full Power Calibers” be its own series? No, because then there would only be two episodes! So instead, we’re rolling today’s two most popular full power .30 cal rounds into the series on intermediates, primarily as [Read More…]
Previously, courtesy of The Wound Channel we got our first looks at the stellar ballistics of the 7.62mm M80A1 EPR round, which proved to combine excellent fragmentation with good armor penetration and barrier blind characteristics, while being extremely consistent. [Read More…]
Today I want to address something that has come up in small arms ammunition development several times in the past 150 years: The small caliber bullet problem. For the sake of this article, I’ll characterize this problem as a perceived trend recognized on several [Read More…]
One of the primary focuses of my study of modern small arms has been that of their terminal effectiveness, i.e. their “lethality” or “wounding”, although neither of these latter terms are exactly correct. Over the past several years, I have [Read More…]
In the first article discussing the mechanisms by which a firearm locks its breech, we mentioned briefly two quantities that are important for small arms design: Pressure, and bolt thrust. The latter we’ll discuss in a later installment, but today we’ll [Read More…]
While today the Italian company Franchi is not a heavy-hitting military small arms manufacturer, in the mid-1950s the company did produce some very interesting rifles, carbines, and submachine guns for the military market. The most recognizable of these is the LF-57 [Read More…]
We live in a world today that is completely inundated with AR-15 pattern rifles. In 2016, for just five Benjamins – sometimes even less! – you can purchase your very own fantactical black rifle and rely on it to work when you need to and shoot where you [Read More…]
Earlier this week, my fellow TFB writer Pete M wrote a post arguing that a manual safety has no place on the modern defensive handgun. I think he’s right for the most part, but I’d like to explore something he didn’t consider. Pete’s point is [Read More…]
So you just bought a shiny new (to you) milsurp firearm, but the problem is that it’s caked in cosmoline, that nasty, waxy, smelly (and supremely effective) rust preventative that just about every military on the planet uses for long-term gun storage. What do you [Read More…]
This subject has come up in my comments recently, and I thought I would explore it in a post proper. To adopt the 6.5 Grendel (or, as we’ll see, something like it), the US Army would need to develop and procure new complete upper receivers, magazines, buffers, and [Read More…]
On my recent article “Ballistics 101: What Is Ballistic Coefficient?”, commenter Anthony asked for clarification on some points: Thanks for the info, but I don’t feel I know what ballistic coefficient is after reading the article. You state, “A [Read More…]
The gear of the US infantryman during World War I was some of the best in the period, from the ammunition pouches, to the uniform, and the rifles. Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons has taken a reproduction uniform and an original M1917 rifle and M1911 handgun out to the [Read More…]
The mid-late 1950s… Could there be a more optimistic time in United States history? I feel there’s no better rifle to illustrate the industry, innovation, and unbridled optimism of that time than the Armalite AR-10 7.62x51mm select-fire military rifle. Made [Read More…]
The US Army has begun a program to create a lightweight .50 caliber machine gun to replace the venerable M2 Browning. The program will, like the M240L machine gun, use titanium to reduce weight by 20-30 percent. Scout.com and NationalInterest.org both have stories on [Read More…]
Is it Toggle Month, or what? Readers of TFB have so far been treated to several posts in April on the famous toggle-locked Luger pistol, but the fun’s not over yet! In the 1930s, the Japanese were – like many major powers at the time – looking to [Read More…]
Whenever anyone, regardless of their political views, asks me about guns, I talk to them openly and empathetically, and then I offer to take them shooting – and emphasize that we’ll do it safely. Out of those I’ve offered range trips to, most of [Read More…]
In the comments section of my recent article on the YouTube Channel Bloke on the Range, the subject arose of the AIA M10 Enfield series, one of which is used by Bloke in one of his videos. These were Australian-built rifles made roughly to the extremely venerable [Read More…]
One of the most criminally ignored elements of military small arms ammunition in the casual discourse is weight. Despite being one of the most important elements from a logistical and human factors perspective, the subject of weight rarely comes up in discussions about [Read More…]
The M1 is an old design, one of the very first successful selfloaders (certainly the first very successful one). That means that owning and shooting an M1 is an experience where almost anything can happen. Like, for example, the gun spontaneously disassembling itself [Read More…]
How many people really are “average”? Is it possible to design a system to fit the average person, and if not, what’s the alternative? A recent article published on thestar.com examines this question, excerpting the work of L. Todd Rose from his recent [Read More…]
I received this email from a reader a little less than a week ago: Hi! I’d love to see a series of articles on the advantages and disadvantages of the various pistol calibers from the perspective of the concealed carrier. There’s a lot of conflicting [Read More…]
Do piston guns handle heat better than DI guns? If so, why? If not what shortcomings do they have? The video from the popular YouTube channel IraqVeteran8888 embedded below doesn’t quite answer these questions, but it’s still very interesting: The end [Read More…]
Yesterday, we discussed the past, present, and future of infantry small arms calibers. That post was a highly introductory one, and there’s much, much more ground to cover on that subject. Today, we’ll talk about a technology that didn’t quite make it [Read More…]
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