If you want a Mini-14 buy one. If you want a carbine for a specific purpose, however, and provided have access to virtually any other modern carbine design, pick just about anything else. I say this not to disparage Ruger or the people who own Minis, but because [Read More…]
In January, just before the 2017 SHOT Show, I got the opportunity to travel to Cody Wyoming to visit the Cody Firearms Museum at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, to see some of their rare firearms and bring photos of them to our readers. Every gun nut has heard of [Read More…]
The first nation to begin serious work on the problem of an infantry rifle that could load itself between shots was none other than the then-military superpower of France. In 1886, the French revolutionized the infantry weapon by introducing the smokeless-power, [Read More…]
A retarded blowback rifle extracts cases from the chamber while they are still under considerable pressure – over 35,000 PSI. Because of this pressure, the walls of the cartridge cases adhere strongly to the barrel’s chamber walls, while the head is forced [Read More…]
Beginning in the last decade of the 19th Century, the French government began work on the next great advancement in infantry small arms technology: The selfloading rifle. By 1916, after the outbreak of World War I, they had produced what many consider the most advanced [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…]
Well, it’s no secret that I am a sucker for early selfloading rifles. The sheer number of ideas that were being explored in the early decades when these rifles were undergoing military trials creates a fascinating body of work for us gun nerds in the modern day to [Read More…]
Some of John Browning’s contributions to the effort of the First World War – like the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle and the M1917 Browning Machine Gun – are well-known, but there’s one that never made it to production, or even any substantial [Read More…]
Paul Mauser, the person who with his brother was chiefly responsible for the excellent line of Mauser bolt-action rifles that even today are the pattern for almost all modern bolt-action designs, lost an eye in 1901 during testing of a self-loading rifle which had an [Read More…]
This is the second part of a series of posts seeking to describe and analyze the 7.62mm Light Rifle concept promoted by the Americans, and subsequently adopted by NATO in various forms. This series will cover development from before World War II to the present day, [Read More…]
Now that all the guns of Ian’s educational videos have been auctioned off, it is time for a more traditional Forgotten Weapons post, of the kind he’s been doing for several years now. The subject of his latest is the Mannlicher 1885 self-loading rifle, [Read More…]
Fifty-four years ago plus five days, nearly thirteen hundred troops of the paramilitary Cuban exile group Brigade 2506 landed in Cuba, in an attempt to overthrow the Communist Cuban government, led by Fidel Castro. Sponsored by the CIA, the Brigade was armed with a [Read More…]
The Czech Republic has always been a nation that hits above its weight in the small arms field. Despite being a relatively small country with a somewhat checkered history, it has consistently put out high quality, innovative firearms that compete very well with those [Read More…]
With the introduction of the successful metallic cartridge in the 1840s, an explosion of innovation directed towards rapid-firing infantry weapons rocked the world. The culmination of this would be the mass-produced self-loading rifle, realized with the adoption of [Read More…]
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