The Firearm Blog

This pistol belonged to a member of EOKA, a group who fought against the British and Turkish for Cypriot independence during the 1950’s.

The barrel on the pistol is a 20mm cartridge case! I think the general idea was to pack a very small charge of blackpowder at the back of the “barrel” by the touch hole and jam some sort of projectile in the front, sort of like a blackpowder cannon. As the text in the above photo says, it would have need to be held right up to the victims head.

I do wonder if it was ever fired because a cartridge case is not designed to hold up against pressure, it is designed to expand. I suspect this would do as much, if not more, damage to the operator than it would to the intended target.

Hat Tip: weissent @ MP.net

Michael Z. Williamson has posted photos of a Build Party Weekend during which he and a bunch of other guys made and repaired guns. During the weekend Mike made the receiver and some of the internals of the below AK.

Beautiful wood

More photos here.

James found this photos of a pair of homemade pistols that appear to be chambered in .303 British! Apparently they, along with the cartridges, were confiscated from some students. Can you imagine the blast of burning power that must shoot out of these!

I found the following photos of a Martini-Henry .303 1870 rifle which has been converted into a pistol. It was captured by Marines in Afghanistan.

The pistol has an original Martini-Henry barrel which was cut down to 2.5″ and sights carved out of it. Other than the addition of the pistol grip and sling swivels, the pistol is made entirely from original parts.

These pistols, converted from rifles in the Khyber Pass, are said to be common in that part of the world. It is designed to for one purpose: to kill an enemy in order to take his weapons … that is of course if the death-trap of a gun does not kill the operator first!

More information about this pistol is at gunboards.com.

Daniel Eindhoven has build a very sci-fi looking semi-automatic coil gun.

The pistol uses a single magnetic coil to pull the projectile out of the gravity fed magazine and towards the coil, thereby accelerating the projectile. It then shuts off the coil and the projectile, because of its momentum, continues on its course through the barrel and out of the muzzle.

This gun shoots 648 grain projectiles at a speed of 100 feet/second, which works out to be 14 ft/lbs of energy. To put that in perspective, it is about half the muzzle energy of a .22 CB Cap and 10% of a high velocity .22 Long Rifle’s muzzle energy. It would certainty bruise the skin.

Like laser guns and rail guns the practicability of coil guns is limited by the amount of power they require. Until we can safety store vast amounts of electrical energy in a small package, carrying around energy in the form of smokeless power will be the preferred method of reaching-out-and-touching-something.

Hat Tip: Engadget

The Election-Gun-Buying-Mania does not appear to be purely an American phenomenon. The black market in India have seen prices for guns double since before the general election. The arms dealers claim the spike in demand is attributed to the various political factions arming themselves. The Telegraph of India reports:

He said each round of bullet fetches Rs 150 to Rs 200, pipe-guns are Rs 1,000 a piece, and single-shotters between Rs 3,000 and Rs 5,000. “There is good demand during elections and both the CPM and the Congress buy them. That is why we have almost doubled the prices now. We test the fitness of each piece we sell, if a bullet turns out to be dud, we return half the money charged through the linkman,” he said.

Nice of them to return half the cost of any dud ammunition! One US Dollar buys about 50 Indian rupees.

The first phase of the general election began in mid April and will end mid May. There are an estimated to be 714 million voters.

A Homemade pistol found by Indian police.

These photos are apparently of a Palestinian using some sort of homemade grenade launcher. It looks like it could be a 40mm grenade in the barrel, or maybe some type of 40mm less/non-lethal grenade like round, such as tear gas.

It appears to work by striking the firing pin (a drill bit) with a stone. I would not want to be within 200 yards of somebody firing that weapon.

Russian VOG-25 40mm Grenade. Photo from gunbroker.

UPDATE: DrStrangegun noticed that the size of the launcher is very simular to Russian GP-30 launcher. The Grenade is propelled through the vents you see in the above photo. Much like a rocket.

GP-30. From Wikipedia.

Hat Tip: MP.net

James of Hell in a Handbasket spotted this photo on a Peruvian travel blog. It is homemade percussion lock gun. The owner apparently uses homemade gun powder (not hard to do … but kids don’t try this at home).

If you have read this blog for a while, you know how much I like examining homemade guns

Smooth bore or rifled? Probably smoothbore, looks like a pipe for a barrel.

More info about the gun at Hell in a Handbasket.

An 80 year old Finnish man invented this .22 LR belt fed machine gun. It could be fake but looks legit and is plausible. Jani confirms it is real in the comments below.

Click to expand.

The approximate translation of the caption:

80-year-old hameenlinnalaisininoori developed drilling machine, the machine became a weapon, which became a speed of 420 shots per minute. suitable balance 22 caliber cartridges.

420 rounds per minute! Not bad considering it is powdered by a drill. For comparison a blowback MAC-10 machine pistol fires 9mm around at about 1,090 round/minute. It may use the blow back to reset itself after each round

A big thanks to reader illspirit for the link.

Hat Tip: Scanned image from naurunappula.com

Last week Engadget reported that a man was killed by an exploding cell phone battery. Turns out he was carrying a homemade pistol, which fell on the ground, discharged and he was hit by the bullet. Engadget reports:

According to some roughly translated reports from Sohu.com, the “imitation firearm with bullets” suddenly fell to the ground at one point, which caused the bullets to fire up into the man’s chest and neck arteries, leading to massive blood loss

The bullet damaged his cellphone which was the reason for the confusion in the media.

About two weeks ago the police in Winnipeg, Canada, confiscated a a bunch of saw off shotguns, ammo and a unidentified submachine gun that is reported to be homemade.

Full photo at The Winnipeg Sun

The Winnipeg Sun reports:

Possibly homemade, the submachine-gun and five sawed-off shotguns, along with ammunition, were seized at a house in the 400-block of Manitoba Avenue on Jan. 7, police said.

Three males, aged 17, 27 and 28, are facing almost 120 charges.

If it is homemade whoever made it did a very good job. Either it is homemade or of a pre-1950ish design. Note that it has a non-telescoping bolt resulting in a long receiver.

At first I thought it may be an MP-40, but it is not. Can anyone here identify it? Please provide a link to a photo in the comments if you can.

Regular readers know that I have fascination with homemade guns

The problem with blogs is that shortly after something interesting is posted it is moved to the dusty archives in the recesses of the blog and only ever uncovered by the occasional google visitor. I came across, courtesy of google, a series of articles at SaysUncle on building an AK all the way from a flat receiver which was written before I started reading gun blogs.

The start of the project. From Part 1.

If you missed this series back in 2005 I highly recommend having a read of it.

Jennersen has just started down the homemade AK path and is blogging his progress. Expect some interesting posts from him in the future.

TFB reader Mehul emailed me some photos that his friend, a law enforcement officer, took of confiscated homemade pistols manufactured by Naxalite (communist) rebels in North East India.

Mehul said that when he was in India some years ago their backyard guns were very primitive. Automobile exhaust tubes were being used as barrels for crude muzzle loading blackpowder firearms. They appear to have improved their gun making skills since then.

Nice grips! Click to expand.

James is right, I am fascinated by homemade weaponry.

Thanks to Mehul for the photos and info.

A worker holds a variety of destroyed guns on December 12, 2008, in Sogamoso, Boyaca department, Colombia. An assortment of 25.000 weapons, seized to different groups that participated in the Colombian internal conflict, were incinerated.

Interesting two barrel pistols. Maybe shotgun conversions.

H/T: VAMAN @ MP.net

English Russia, a humorous blog about all things Russia, has photos of home-made firearms confiscated by police and army in Chechnya.

Click to expand images:

30mm or 40mm grenade launcher?


Looks like a Baikal over and under shotgun
with pistol grip and cut down barrel.


Pretty nifty carbine.

Many more at English Russia.