Welcome everyone to the TFB Armorer’s Bench! As mentioned in the little blurb below, this series will focus on a lot of home armorer and gunsmith activities. In this article, I decided to take a break from the more intensive activities to in the shop and commentate [Read More…]
For military history buffs, there’s nothing better than a good book. For those interested in firearms history and specifically the use of machine guns during the First World War, there’s some good news. The Vickers MG Collection & Research Association, [Read More…]
What the hell is a centrifugal machine gun? In the plainest of terms, it’s a gun that requires no propellant powder and a system which has sparked the imaginations of inventors and gun designers for over 200 years. A couple of months ago I was browsing through the [Read More…]
No this isn’t an edition of Austin’s Hot Gat or Fudd Crap series and I don’t think it was Bubba which got to this particular Short, Magazine, Lee-Enfield. No, this Obrez SMLE is probably a little more legitimate. I came across this rifle in a UK MoD [Read More…]
During the interwar years, Springfield Armory shrunk drastically. To the extreme point of going from five thousand full-time employees to two hundred. One of the ways that Springfield Armory dealt with this was to commit to producing rifles for the National Matches at Camp Perry, Ohio. At first the [Read More…]
What usually happens to numerically significant firearms is that they get put in a museum and carefully guarded. Not the first Springfield M1903, Serial Number One though! Crazy enough, this particular rifle actually rolled right off the production line and into Army service when it was produced [Read More…]
Initial production runs of small arms are always objects of great interest and fascination. They represent the tangible beginning, the first of many, a historical landmark. Especially if they are of designs that go on to influence small arms history. Usually when they [Read More…]
British historian Stephen Wisdom has built a full-scale replica of a World War One tank from fibreglass and wood. The recreation of a French Renault FT light tank has been built for the American Museum in Bath, UK. Wisdom built the fibreglass tank around a wooden frame [Read More…]
Osprey Publications has recently come out with a new title in the Weapon Series of books, “The Anti-Tank Rifle”. It is a light history of the anti-tank rifle from the First World War to the beginning of the Cold War. For those not familiar with the Weapon [Read More…]
Vitaly Kryuchin is the president of IPSC Russia. You have probably seen him in videos where he makes music by shooting at different steel targets dual wielding and hip firing two Glock pistols. If you haven’t seen these videos, you can watch them by clicking [Read More…]
Indy Neidell, the host of “The Great War” YouTube channel, has announced about his plans to start a new project similar to The Great War but telling about the WW2 in the same week by week fashion. This time they are planning to make it a much larger project [Read More…]
If you’re not following both C&Rsenal and Forgotten Weapons you are missing out on some of the best gun history videos around. With C&Rsenal’s current World War One focus, systematically working their way through the weapons of the Great War, and [Read More…]
In this fourteenth installment of Personal Defense Weapon Calibers, we’ll be looking at a highly minimalist incarnation of the PDW/SMG round: The 7.65x20mm French Longue. The story of the French Longue begins with the US entry to World War I and the brilliant [Read More…]
While the US education system tends to highlight and overemphasize the effect of the United States in World War 1, C&Rsenal has not. For the first 50+ episodes, the channel has been covering the various primarily european weapons from The Great War (though there has [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. Today our subject is one of [Read More…]
It is not a secret that Mosin-Nagant rifles are one of the most popular military surplus rifles in the USA. They are relatively affordable, .30 cal reliable rifles just to mention a few reasons of their popularity. The information about the history and various [Read More…]
In World War I, the Germans developed a secret technology that helped them dominate the skies during 1915 and early 1916. The tech? A device that synchronized the firing of a machine gun with the rotation of an aircraft’s propeller, allowing accurate low-mounted [Read More…]
One of the interesting finds pointed out to me by an ammunition collector at Knob Creek is this interesting tidbit of history. The .5 Vickers is a semi rimmed round that was invented in the last year of World War One by necking down a .600 Nitro Express round. It was [Read More…]
In the early winter of 1918, it seemed as though the Boche wouldn’t stop, and the war was sure to continue on into 1919. New, secret weapons were needed to complete the victory over Germany, and one of these was John Pedersen’s “device”, [Read More…]
These days, it’s easy to forget that once upon a time at the dawn of the smokeless powder era there was a huge variety of bolt-action repeating rifles being developed to re-arm the military powers of the world. While the Mauser 98 and its progeny eventually took [Read More…]
A trend towards ever more powerful and longer-ranged ammunition was cut short by the realities of the First World War: Technologies not previously invented or accounted for, such as the man-reaping machine gun and the portable infantry mortar, made the existing infantry [Read More…]
The paradigm was established by the 1870s: Future infantry combat would focus on a combination of entrenchment, and long-range concentrated fire from well-drilled units to defeat the enemy beyond his own effective range. The arms race for a smaller-caliber, [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…]
Arcane Teutonic space magicks gave Imperial German assault troops the advantage in trench warfare during the first Great War, as the Kaiser’s sturmtruppen made deadly use of Arch-Industriemage Georg Luger’s fearsome Lange Pistole 08 “long [Read More…]
One of several interesting automatic individual weapon designs from World War I, the Winchester Machine Rifle was a concept for a dual-purpose anti-observation-balloon/ground weapon that featured several concepts that, for better or worse, were definitely ahead of their [Read More…]
I recently gushed on what I consider one of the best YouTube channels out there *that is not guns-only, but is highly correlated. The Great War is a fantastic project documenting World War 1 week by week exactly as it happened 100 years later. We’re about two [Read More…]
World War 1 is often regarded as one of the most barbaric conflicts of all time, given its implementation of mass-casualty weapons including poison gas, full use of artillery, machine guns, and the brutal depictions of trench warfare. While true, this simplistic [Read More…]
This week, C&Rsenal takes a look at the Italian Bodeo revolver, an interesting transitional type that served all the way through the 1960s. Today, the revolver is a gun that has been virtually perfected for well over a century. While it may seem like this was always [Read More…]
The Fedorov Avtomat is an important milestone in the history of modern small arms. With the Federov, for the first time, an individual soldier could possess automatic firepower in a package small enough to move and fight with, while at the same time [Read More…]
During World War I, manufacturers on both sides, including sporting arms manufacturers, lent their material support for the war effort. One of the more mysterious instances of this has come to be known simply as the “Beholla”, after its primary producer, the [Read More…]
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