Nathaniel is a history enthusiast and firearms hobbyist whose primary interest lies in military small arms technological developments beginning with the smokeless powder era. He can be reached via email at nathaniel.f@staff.thefirearmblog.com.
We’ve posted about the ACR Program here on TFB before, but there’s a lot of information available on the subject through DTIC. The Advanced Combat Rifle program was begun in the late 1980s as a research and development effort which would eventually lead to [Read More…]
Title image: This new shooter has exercised proper trigger follow through while shooting my Lithgow Enfield. Unfortunately, one leg of the rest he is using has begun to fall off the table. He will have to readjust his shooting position before he takes the next shot, [Read More…]
On the third Saturday of every month, TFB will choose a blog to feature on its front page as part of its Blog of The Month series. Today’s Blog of The Month is the excellent Historical Firearms Blog, which covers not only firearms of historical relevance or [Read More…]
RIA is offering up for auction an example of the Walther KPK – a very rare, and very desirable handgun developed by Walther during World War II for vehicle crewmen. The KPK was based on the PPK, and is almost identical, save for an aluminum frame and shrouded [Read More…]
It’s not every day you see a gun as rare and historically significant as this for sale! Rock Island Auction is selling a British Pedersen rifle, an early American selfloader design and direct competitor to the early Garand. What’s more, Ian of Forgotten [Read More…]
Small Arms Review has an excellent article on the little-known Robinson Machine Pistol, an Australian hand-held automatic weapon in 9mm. The Robinson uses a mechanism somewhat like the QX-04 handgun covered on this site in a previous article, but closer in some ways to [Read More…]
The outdoor blog Hits and Misses has a great series of posts on remodeling a Brno Mauser (one that has already been partially sporterized, for the milsurp conservationists out there). Having “butchered” no less than three Mausers myself, I found the posts [Read More…]
Taurus has announced a new product for the concealed carry market. From the press release: (Miami, FL) – Taurus®, the global leader in revolver manufacturing, is redefining the handgun category with its newest introduction. The new, patented CURVE is a [Read More…]
Strange Guns (formerly Rare, Antique & Beautiful Firearms) has a short overview of some of Colonel Lewis’s lesser known designs. For example, many people know that it was Hitler’s naming of the MP. 44 “Sturmgewehr” that brought the term [Read More…]
One of the weapons developed during the early days of small-caliber high velocity research was a double-barreled .22 caliber FAL. This was a follow-on project to the modified T48 (American FAL test rifle) used to test the .22 HV featured in our last Weekly DTIC, itself [Read More…]
Maxim Popenker blogs about a modified Viet-Cong SVT-40 with some additional features: While it looks very close to the original SVT-40 carbine, of which only a few thousand were made, it’s more probable that the gun was cut down to size from a full-size rifle. [Read More…]
Here’s an interesting weapon from Chinese firearms designers (courtesy of Armory Exotic, an excellent blog) – at first it appears to be a pretty mundane-looking handgun, but a closer look reveals a pretty unique operating mechanism: The barrel is [Read More…]
WeaponsMan raises the question of how many guns are best to regularly train with – examining both “the man with one gun” and Burt Gummer extremes. His conclusion is that training is best done with one gun at a time, with the exception of advanced [Read More…]
Colt Defense, LLC is apparently having trouble paying off its loans. BusinessWeek reports: Colt Defense LLC is seeking capital to stave off an “expected default” next month as gunmakers suffer from lower defense spending and as consumers purchase fewer firearms. The [Read More…]
GunLab has some excellent photos of the steps involved in making AR-18 upper and lower receivers. The first article shows the stages of stamping the lower, while the second shows the same for the upper. The AR-18 is a design intended to be mass produced by countries [Read More…]
We blogged about Brazilian gun manufacturer Taurus’s recall of almost one hundred thousand pistols a year ago, but apparently the problems with Taurus weapons have not stopped since nor are they limited only to the 24/7 DS model then recalled. Weaponsman has [Read More…]
Title Image: Wolf Performance Amunition makes steel cased 6.5 Grendel; most likely the inspiration for the new round. A stray has followed them home: Russian small arms designers have apparently created a close clone of the 6.5 Grendel, called 6.5x39mm. At first [Read More…]
Jean Huon is a – possibly the premiere – French military small arms historian of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Proud Promise is his effort to document the story of the French military selfloading rifle, up to the year 1979. Along with its [Read More…]
Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons has uploaded this month’s episode of InRange TV – and now it’s free to watch. Ian writes: It’s been a long time coming, but we finally have a new InRange video available, and free to view! We have moved InRange [Read More…]
American Rifleman’s Mark Keefe got the enviable opportunity to handle the earliest FN prototype of the SCAR-L rifle. The rifle sports an aluminum lower, looking very much like that of the FNC from which it was derived, and a 3D printed prototype stock. Given that [Read More…]
Will the AK-12 be produced in 6.5 Grendel? It certainly seems that way, based on this graphic at RIA.ru. It’s possible their information comes from Wikipedia, the English version of which cites a broken link (Russian Wikipedia makes the same claim, with no [Read More…]
Header image: The .264 USA on a display block, flanked by 7.62x51mm (left) and 5.56x45mm NATO (right). Modeled and rendered by the author in SolidWorks. The .264 USA was designed by members of the Army Marksmanship Unit as a possible next-generation military rifle [Read More…]
Remington has won the Marine Corps’ contract to upgrade its existing M40A5 sniper rifles. From the press release: Madison, N.C. -The United States Marine Corps Systems Command has awarded Remington Defense a contract to provide up to 2,000 modular stocks, spares, [Read More…]
This week’s document, An Investigation of An Experimental Caliber .22 High Velocity Bullet For Rifles, is the report created from one of the first serious investigations of small caliber high velocity ammunition for the standard infantry weapon. Its author, [Read More…]
According to TFB reader Mac21500, the civilian version of the 9mm PP-19-01 Vityaz submachine gun has hit the European market. Apparently, the weapon is available for under $1000 (it’s unclear whether that’s USD or something else). The magazines are limited [Read More…]
Colt is introducing a rifle family based on the CM 901 series of rifles, intended to increase modularity and the ease with which one rifle can be converted into another caliber. From the press release: Colt’s Manufacturing Company, one of the world’s leading [Read More…]
Forgotten Weapons has the story on an 1895 Winchester-Lee rifle that exploded three days ago. The rifle was firing ammunition made from modified .30-40 Krag brass at the time of incident. Fortunately, the owner was only mildly injured. Ian of FW speculates that the [Read More…]
The historically interesting – though obsolete – Beretta 92S pistol is available for an excellent price from Palmetto State Armory, blogs WeaponsMan. The 92 series, once described by Andrew Tuohy as “the best handgun you should never buy”, went [Read More…]
What was the Soviet reaction to the Sturmgewehr? EnsignExpendable, at his excellent Soviet Gun Archives blog has the answer: “To the People’s Commissar of Defense, Marshal of the Soviet Union, comrade I.V. Stalin: Since the Spring of this year, forces of [Read More…]
Ballistic Radio has been running their Knight’s SR-15 pretty hard. How hard? They’ve so far fired 9,500 rounds, without any cleaning or weapon-induced malfunctions. The picture at the title of this article says a lot, but there’s a video as well. [Read More…]
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