One of the early automatic rifles that has caught my interest for several years going now is the Winchester Machine Rifle, also known as the Burton Machine Rifle or the Light Machine Rifle. The Burton – as I’ll call it for the purposes of today’s post [Read More…]
Let’s take a brief tangent. While my job is to write about firearms for you guys, I have many other interests; one of them is Medieval history. It’s a pretty cool thing to be interested in these days, as YouTube is practically bursting with awesome channels [Read More…]
In the comments section of my 6.8mm SPC article last year, I was asked what I thought about future infantry small arms. This is a subject that has dominated my thinking over the past several years, and much of the historical research I have undertaken has been in [Read More…]
Previously, we looked at the Breda Model 39, an Italian rifle that competed against what would become the Beretta BM-59 in a bid to be the Italian military rifle of the 1950s and ’60s. TFB friend Trevor Weston sends along more photos of three Italian rifles [Read More…]
The German Federal Office of Bundeswehr Equipment, Information Technology and In-Service Support (BAAINBw) has released a Prior Information Notice (PIN) to the industry, regarding new infantry weapons that could replace the troubled G36 rifle. A PIN is the European [Read More…]
This is the zeroeth 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…]
Controversy over small arms is nothing new. Back in the early 1950s, when the 7.62x51mm was called the “.30 Light Rifle” and NATO still believed it could achieve the goal of a universal standard rifle, there was (quite naturally, given the large number of [Read More…]
Is the M16A4 worth the extra weight and length it brings? Howard of LooseRounds has weighed in with an article relating some of his experiences with the rifle. His conclusion is as follows: I have often told people that the M4 is a jack of all trade, but master of [Read More…]
In my critique of the M1 Garand rifle on Sunday, I noted that John Cantius Garand was not only a firearms designer, but a machinist as well. It was his intimate understanding of the world of the shop floor that made his rifle economical to produce, which is in my [Read More…]
In 2012, AR-15 designer Jim Sullivan applied for a patent for a new rifle design. Apparently based on his Ultimax 100 light machine gun, the rifle features a quick-change barrel, a guide-rail-less receiver with a “backbone” guide rod attached to the lower [Read More…]
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…]