Forgotten Weapons
Published 22 Feb 2023From Paul on Patreon:
“I’ve always thought there were a lot of older guns that deserve to be reproduced, many of which could be really simple to manufacture. PSA is planning the release of their StG44 repro which is exciting. But why don’t we see this sort of thing more often. I suppose not everyone in the firearms community is going to want this sort of thing, but I think there are a lot of guns that would sell well enough to justify their reproduction.”Fundamentally, we don’t see more reproduction firearms because they are actually a lot harder and more expensive to make than people would think, and the market for them is smaller than people would think. Re-engineering old firearms for new production is a really substantial project, and the original data required rarely exists. The guns must be cheap enough and reliable enough to attract modern buyers, which will often require compromises on authenticity — which immediately reduces the already-small pool of potential buyers.
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June 11, 2023
Ask Ian: Why So Few Reproduction Historic Guns?
June 2, 2023
Germany Adopts the PPSh in 9mm: the MP-41(r)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Feb 2023During World War Two, both German and Russian soldiers often thought that the other side’s weapons were better than their own. In particular, both sides often preferred their opponents’ SMGs. In late 1941, a group of German officers formally requested that Germany simply copy and produce the PPSh-41. This led to the HWA formally studying the question of PPSh-41 vs MP-40 … and they found that the German gun was better, but the Russian magazine was better.
Naturally, as a result of this finding, the German military chose to convert captured Russian PPSh-41s to use MP-40 magazines. The conversion used standard MP40 magazines, and required magazine well adapters and new 9mm barrels. Some 10,000 such conversions were made in total. Some used cast magwell adapters and some were stamped, and the barrels were made from standard MP40 barrels turned down to fit PPSh trunnions.
The standard 7.62mm PPSh-41 in German service was designated MP-717(r), while the ones changed to 9x19mm like this were designated MP-41(r). Many thanks to Limex for giving me access to film this one for you!
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May 30, 2023
M1886 Lebel Rifle at the Range
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Mar 2013The French M1886 Lebel was the first smallbore smokeless powder rifle adopted by a major military, and was a game changer in the European arms race in the 1880s. It wasn’t an outstanding design in many ways (like the slow-loading tube magazine and requirement to use a screwdriver to remove the bolt), but its 8mm smokeless cartridge jumped France to the front of the technological race regardless. Today, we’re taking one out to the range to see how it shoots.
May 27, 2023
Lee 1875 Vertical Action Carbine
Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Aug 2014The 1875 Lee Vertical Action was an experimental rifle designed by James Paris Lee (of Lee Enfield and Lee Navy fame) as an idea to increase the rate of fire from single-shot Army rifles. He touted an impressive 30 rounds in 45 seconds with the rifle, thanks to several design elements that combined to make a very fast manual of arms. In total only 143 of these guns were made at Springfield Armory, and this example is the only known carbine variant.
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May 24, 2023
Darne Model 1933: An Economic & Modular Interwar MG
Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Feb 2023The Darne company was one of relatively few private arms manufacturers in France, best known for shotguns. During World War One they got into the machine gun trade, making licensed Lewis guns for the French air service. After making a few thousand of those, Regis Darne designed his own belt-fed machine gun in 1917. A large order was placed by the French military, but it was cancelled before production began because of the end of the war.
Darne continued to develop this design in the 1920s, while also producing sporting arms to keep the business running. The gun was intended mostly as an aircraft gun, but designed in a rather modular fashion, easily made into both magazine-fed and belt-fed infantry versions as well as downing, wing, and observer aerial models. It was actually bought by the French Air Force, as well as several other countries during the inter-war period.
The example we are looking at today is an infantry configuration, with a bipod and light-profile barrel. It is chambered for the French 7.5x54mm cartridge, and is officially the Model 1933 (one of the last iterations made).
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May 20, 2023
Cobray Terminator 12ga Shotgun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 Feb 2015The Cobray Terminator is an unusual — and unusually impractical — single-shot 12 gauge shotgun. It uses a sort of open bolt system in which the barrel is under spring pressure, and slams backwards into a fixed firing pin when the trigger is pulled. Only about 1500 of these were made before they were discontinued due to poor sales (not because of ATF intervention, as some people believe).
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May 17, 2023
Swiss LMG25 light machine gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Jul 2012This week, we will be featuring all Swiss weapons here at Forgotten Weapons. Kind of like Shark Week, but more land-locked. We’ll kick off today with a video showing you around a Swiss LMG-25 light machine gun we found for sale at Cornet & Company in Brussels (a better gun shop than any I’ve found here in the US, I must say). Like pretty much all Swiss arms, it’s a gorgeous example of precision machining — and like pretty much all Swiss arms it was too expensive for anyone else to adopt. On this, as with other Swiss weapons I’ve handled, you can just feel the quality in how smoothly the moving parts operate.
In case you’re wondering, this LMG25 is live and fully functional, and priced at 1950 Euros (about $2800) — mere pocket change compared to machine gun prices here. It’s not too difficult to get the permit to own it in Belgium, but sadly there is no legal way to bring it into the US.
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May 14, 2023
Arming God’s Battalions: a Papal States Rolling Block
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Feb 2023The Remington Rolling Block was a very popular rifle in the 1860s and 1870s, and probably would have been a better choice than the Trapdoor Springfield for the US military. But among the nations that did adopt is were the Papal States. While Vatican City is a tiny sovereign enclave today in Rome, in the 1800s the Pope directly controlled a much larger area, roughly the size of Switzerland early in the 1800s.
Three different models of Rolling Block were adopted by the Papal States in the effort to rebuild their military after a serious defeat in 1860 — rifles, carbines, and musketoons — the latter being what we have today. All three were made by the Nagant Brothers in Liege and can be identified by the Papal crest (the crossed keys of St Peter) on the top of the barrel. Westley Richards in the UK also produced 5,000 rolling block rifles, but these had serious quality problems.
The Nagant Brothers rifles began to arrive in the fall of 1868. They saw service for only a few years, as the departure of French forces in the fall of 1870 (to take part in the Franco-Prussian War) allowed the Italian Army to seize Vatican City without much difficulty. A few survived in the hands of the Pope’s personal guard, but most of these rolling blocks were taken into Italian Army service. They would serve until being replaced by Vetterli rifles, and were eventually sent to Ethiopia as military aid to Emperor Menelik II in the 1880s.
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May 11, 2023
Bechowiec: Polish Teenager Makes a Resistance SMG
Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 Jan 2023The Bechowiec (or Beha) is a fascinating SMG produced in small numbers in southern Poland under German occupation during World War Two. It was made for use by the Bataliony Chłopskie (Peasant Battalions) by a young man named Henryk Strąpoć.
Henryk built his first (quite illegal) gun at the age of 15 in 1937, and was promptly arrested for it. He avoided prison only on account of being a minor, and promised not to do it again. Well, at least he promised not to get caught again — he built three more guns (two semiauto pistols and a revolver) by the time Germany invaded Poland in 1939. During the occupation he joined the the resistance and set to work doing what he must have fantasized about; building clandestine small arms.
Being more or less familiar with pistols but having never handled a submachine gun, he made some creative design choices. His SMG is basically a scaled-up Ruby-type action — chambered for 9x19mm with a simple blowback slide, it is hammer fired from a closed bolt. He designed a complex but effective selective-fire trigger system, complete with a correct auto sear. The first gun was ready in the spring of 1943, and he had a makeshift production going by early 1944. A total of 11 of the guns were made by July 1944, some in 9mm (using bored-out WW1 Mauser barrels) and some in 7.62x25mm Tokarev (using Mosin Nagant barrels).
Only one example survives today, and it is housed in the Polish Army Museum (and sadly, deactivated). Many thanks to the Museum for giving me access to film it for you! Check them out at: http://www.muzeumwp.pl/?language=EN
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May 8, 2023
Inkunzi Strike 20mm Grenade MG
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Jan 2023Tony Neophytou developed this for Denel Land Systems, which has completely fallen apart as a company and left it now as his own independent design, with no manufacturer. I filmed this video in 2018, to show the prototype version of the Strike, which has since been improved and further developed. Perhaps some day it can find a manufacturer?
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May 5, 2023
Alligator Creek: America Learns to Fight the Japanese
Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Jan 2023The Battle of Alligator Creek (aka Battle of the Tenaru) was a formative moment in the American World War Two psyche. After making an unopposed landing on Guadalcanal and taking its mostly-completed airfield at minimal cost, the US Marines had to defend their permitter on the night of August 21st, 1942.
Colonel Kiyonoa Ichiki was sent from the Japanese base at Truk with about 900 tough veteran soldiers to push the Marines off the airfield. These men had originally been slated to assault Midway Island, but the Japanese naval defeat there forced a change in plans. Ichiki was overconfident, and more concerned about retaking the islands of Tulagi, Gavutu, and Tanambogo across the straights, where Japan’s main base in the area had also been captured by Marine Raiders. Marching up the coastline towards Henderson Field, Ichiki’s men hit the thin single strand of Marine barbed wire about about 1:30am on the morning of there 21st. An intense firefight erupted, with the well dug-in Marine positions opening up with .30 caliber and .50 caliber machine guns, small arms, and 37mm canister rounds.
The fighting continued after daybreak, with Ichiki’s men digging in on the east bank of Alligator Creek. The Marines launched a two prong counterattack, with one force crossing the Creek inland and advancing down the east bank while a second group, including several Stuart light tanks, advanced across the sandbar. These two groups linked up in the early afternoon of the 21st, almost completely annihilating the Ichiki Detachment.
This was the first real land combat between American and Japanese forces in which American soldiers were able to report back on their experience. It was here that the US military as an institution learned that the Japanese would die rather than surrender, and this engagement set the American expectations for the rest of the Pacific campaign.
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May 3, 2023
Finland’s High Power Rig
Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Jan 2023Finland used a variety of FN pistols prior to WW2, and had already evaluated the High Power when Russian invaded and the Winter War began. With an urgent need for more arms, Finland ordered a batch of High Power pistols, which FN was happy to include with the other arms orders already being delivered to Finland. In total, the Finns bought 2,400 of them, with 900 delivered in February 1940 and 1,500 in March 1940. All of them were bought as rigs with leather holsters riveted to flat board shoulder stocks (note that a Finnish pistol with a Finnish-contract original stock is exempted form the NFA in the US, and need not be registered as a short-barreled rifle).
This delivery schedule meant that only a few were available in time to be used in the Winter War, and they saw much greater use in the Continuation War. They were particularly appreciated by the Finnish Air Force as survival weapons. This is often misinterpreted to mean that they were exclusively used by the Air Force; in fact the quantity of Finnish aircraft was small enough that only a small fraction of the pistols were issued to pilots.
Finnish contract pistols have serial numbers falling between 11,000 and 15,000 (and not all guns in that range are Finnish). The stocks were marked in large numbers with the serial number of the gun, although matching rigs are quite scarce today. Some, but not all, were later marked “SA” by the Finnish Army. During the continuation War some of the holsters were separated from the stocks, and some of the pistols had new square front sights put on (a common Finnish preference, done to Lugers as well).
About 40% of the High Powers were lost or rendered unserviceable by the end of the Continuation War. The remainder were kept in service until the 1980s, when they were replaced by the Browning Double Action and slowly sold as surplus.
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April 30, 2023
North Korean Type 70 Pistol
Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Apr 2015The “Hermit Kingdom” of North Korea has a number of somewhat unusual military firearms that are not quite direct copies of anything else, but we very rarely get to see examples of them up close. The Type 70 was intended for high-ranking officers, replacing the Type 64 (which was a copy of the Browning 1900). The Type 70 shows features from the PPK and Makarov, as well as other elements not taken directly from existing designs. The hammer is an exposed single-action type, and the muzzle profile is very reminiscent of the Makarov. The action is simple blowback (in .32 ACP, despite the 7.62mm marking on the slide), but the barrel is set in the side and easily removed, instead of being fixed to the frame as is typical of blowback pistols. The safety is a cross-bolt button which doubles as the block holding the barrel in place. The Type 70 is quite comfortable in the hand, and probably nice to shoot given its .32ACP chambering.
April 27, 2023
M1908 Mondragon Semiauto Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 Nov 2014The M1908 Mondragon is widely acknowledged to have been the first self-loading rifle adopted as a standard infantry arm by a national military force. There are a couple of earlier designs used by military forces, but the Mondragon was the first really mass-produced example and deserves its place in firearms history.
Designed by Mexican general Manuel Mondragon (who had a number of other arms development successes under his belt by this time), the rifles were manufactured by SIG in Switzerland. They are very high quality guns, if a bit clunky in their handling.
The design used a long-action gas piston and a rotating bolt to lock. Interestingly, the bolt had two full sets of locking lugs; one at the front and one at the rear as well as two set of cams for the operating rod and bolt handle to rotate the bolt with. The standard rifle used a 10-round internal magazine fed by stripper clips, but they were also adapted for larger detachable magazines and drums.
Unfortunately, the rifle required relatively high-quality ammunition to function reliably, and Mexico’s domestic production was not up to par. This led to the rifles having many problems in Mexican service, and Mexico refused to pay for them after the first thousand of their 4,000-unit order arrived. The remaining guns were kept by SIG, and ultimately sold to Germany for use as aircraft observer weapons.
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April 24, 2023
Pedersen Selfloading Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Nov 2014When the US military decided to seriously look at replacing the 1903 Springfield with a semiautomatic service rifle, two designers showed themselves to have the potential to design an effective and practical rifle. One was John Garand, and the other was John Pedersen. Pedersen was an experienced and well-respected gun designer, with previous work including the WWI “Pedersen Device” that converted a 1903 into a pistol-caliber semiauto carbine and the Remington Model 51 pistol, among others.
Pedersen’s rifle concept used a toggle locking mechanism similar in concept to the Borchardt and Luger pistols, but designed to handle the much higher pressure of a rifle cartridge. Specifically, the .276 Pedersen cartridge, which pushed a 125 grain bullet at about 2700 fps. Both Pedersen’s rifle and the contemporary prototypes of the Garand rifle used 10-round en bloc clips of this ammunition.
Ultimately, Pedersen lost out to Garand. Among the major reasons why was that his toggle action was really a delayed blowback mechanism, and required lubricated cartridges to operate reliably. Pedersen developed a hard, thin wax coating process for his cartridge cases which worked well and was not prone to the problems of other oil-based cartridge lubricating systems, but Ordnance officers still disliked the requirement. This combined with other factors led to the adoption of the Garand rifle.
After losing out in US military trials, Pedersen still had significant world-wide interest in his rifle, and the Vickers company in England tooled up to produce them in hopes of garnering contracts with one or more other military forces. About 250 rifles were made by Vickers, but they failed to win any contracts and production ceased — making them extremely rare weapons today.
Pedersen lived until 1951, and was well regarded for his sporting arms development with Remington — none other than John Moses Browning described him as “the greatest gun designer in the world”.
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