Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Feb 2018Today we will take a look at the history of Springfield Armory – both the American national arsenal founded in the 1770s and the commercial entity founded in the 1970s.
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Oct 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
The Dutch military started looking for semiauto pistols to replace its aging revolvers around 1899. They tested all the early models: the Roth, Borchardt, Mauser and Mannlicher — and then they obtained a Borchardt-Luger (aka, a Parabellum, or Luger). They first tested a long-barreled model with shoulder stock for artillery crews in 1901. The guns performed very well mechanically, but the officers in charge were dubious about the utility of the gun.
In 1903, another set of trials was run by the infantry, this time on short-barreled Lugers in both 9mm and 7.65mm. In addition, the Dutch requested a number of special changes to a subset of their guns – this “Dutch Model” was to have Dutch markings and a stronger coil mainspring designed by the Dutch ordnance department. That coil mainspring would be adopted by DWM and became the most significant improvement in the New Model Lugers.
Anyway, the 1903 trials were concluded with much success in 1905, and the Dutch War Minister happily adopted the Luger in 9mm. He wrote out an order to start getting the Army new modern pistols … only to be overridden by the Dutch Parliament. They decided that the new guns were basically too dangerous, and cancelled the adoption. This left the Army in a rather unexpected lurch, and they had to restart production of revolvers in 1906 to make up the shortages in handguns.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Apr 2018The OSS experimented with a lot of … unorthodox weapons during World War Two, and one of their overarching goals was a weapon with a 100 yard lethal range but without flash or noise. To this end they experimented with a number of suppressed firearms as well as weird stuff like various crossbow designs, silenced dart gun pistol conversions, and in this case a CO2 powered dart gun. It was code-named the Flying Dragon, and first mentioned in documents in 1943. In the summer of 1945, 15 were manufactured, and 12 of these remained in OSS stocks at the end of the war.
In July 1945 testing, the Flying Dragon was found the be the second-quietest option (the William Tell crossbow was quieter, at 66 decibels to the Dragon’s 69 decibels). However, the testing board noted that a simple suppressed .22 pistol was pretty much just as good, and quite a lot cheaper (and more reliable, I would expect). The problem with a dart gun like this one is that if it is not reliably lethal, the whole point of it being silenced is lost. Anyone shot by that big dart and not killed by it (which would require a pretty significant muzzle velocity) will immediately start making a heck of a lot of noise. OSS investigated options for poison on the darts to give the weapon the necessary lethality, but was unable to find a suitable solution. This led to discussion of using a small hypodermic syringe as a projectile, an even less practical idea — but this was the freewheeling OSS, where such things were not uncommon to consider.
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85704
Forgotten Weapons
Published 31 Aug 2017The PPS-43, designed by Alexei Sudayev based on a previous submachine gun design by I.K. Bezruchko-Vysotsky, was the Soviet replacement for the PPSh-41. The Shpagin submachine gun was a very effective combat weapon, but was time-consuming to produce and required specialized manufacturing tools. The Soviet military wanted a weapon that was cheaper and faster to make, and which could be produced at small shops not experienced in firearms production. The Sudayev design fit these criteria extremely well, being made almost entirely of simple bent metal components.
Production of the first prototype Sudayev submachine guns begin in 1942 in the besieged city of Leningrad, where guns were quite literally taken from the factory door to the front lines and put into service. A few minor flaws were discovered and corrected, and by the time the siege was broken the gun was suitable for mass production. It was designated the PPS-43, and while it was theoretically a replacement for the PPSh-41, it never did actually replace the former weapon. It was decided to continue PPSh-41 production in the factories already tooled up for it, while making use of the PPS-43’s simplicity to put it into production as a range of new factories that did not have the technical capacity to make more complex weapons.
Mechanically, the PPS-43 was a simple blowback gun, using basically the same conceptual operating system as the PPSH-41. However, Sudayev resolved the most significant practical problem with the PPSH-41 by abandoning its unreliable drums and developing his own new double-stack, double-feed 35-round box magazine. The PPS-43 magazine is simpler to load, more reliable in use, and much smoother to insert and remove from the weapon than PPSh magazines. The improvement was substantial enough to justify the use of different and incompatible magazines in the two guns. In conjunction with the discarding of the drum magazine, Sudayev also designed his gun to have a lower rate of fire than the PPSh, to better manage ammunition supply. However, the roughly 600 rpm rate of the PPS-43 is actually relatively difficult to control in that light weapon, where the PPSh-41 was substantially smoother shooting despite (or perhaps because of) firing faster.
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
Русская версия: https://youtu.be/TZxgn4iVMbg
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Oct 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
One of the scarce, small-production manufacturers of the Luger is Krieghoff — Heinrich Krieghoff to be exact. Kreighoff Waffenfabrik was a smallish arms company that wanted to get into major contracts with the rearming German military in the 1930s. They began by bidding on a contract for 10,000 Luger pistols for the Luftwaffe, and won. Krieghoff had previously worked as a subcontractor for the Simson company rebuilding Lugers under the Weimar government. Kreighoff got control of the Simson Luger tooling, and used it to manufacture a new set themselves.
Krieghoff built a total of 13,825 Luger pistols. The first 10,000 were delivered to the Luftwaffe between 1935 and 1937. A further 2,000 were delivered in small batches between 1940 and 1944, with a final 200 in 1945. In addition to these, 1,625 were sold commercially, including a few highly embellished examples. They are renowned for their excellent quality, and have always attracted particular collector interest.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Oct 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
The modularity and clever design of the Stemple Takedown Gun is perhaps best illustrated by the STG-M1A and STG-1928 (these are the same gun with either a horizontal or vertical front grip). In the early 2000s a bunch of Thompson parts kits came into the US, WW2 vintage lend-lease guns sent to Russia. They were M1 and M1A1 models, and had intact barrels but torch-cut receivers. BRP, who makes the Stemple, realized that the sear-to-magwell dimensions on the Thompson were almost identical to the Suomi and Stemple — and that he could make a version of the STG that was a nearly perfect clone of the M1 Thompson.
The registered Stemple receiver slides into a square Thompson lookalike housing, and original Thompson grips, stocks, and hand guards are used. It is chambered for .45ACP, using original Thompson stick magazines (naturally). The result is a submachine gun that almost perfectly duplicates the handling of a true Thompson, without the historical value that makes the Thompson so expensive and keeps many owners from wanting to actually take their Thompsons out to the range.
Note that the gun in this video is an early example, and models made today are able to take both stick and drum magazines. Also, due to the design of the disconnector in the original Thompson FCG, the semiauto setting is not functional in the Stemple version — it’s only full automatic.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
Forgotten Weapons
Published 5 Oct 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
With the MR-73 revolvers finally becoming regularly available in the US, I figured it would be really interesting to see how they are made! So, I headed over to Chapuis Armes, where the Directeur Général, Vincent Chapuis, gave me a really nice tour. Want to see? Let’s go in …
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
Forgotten Weapons
Published 4 Oct 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
Here’s a rifle with an interesting twisting history …
This began life as a German military Gewehr 71/84, made in 1888. It was issued to a unit, but eventually replaced by the Gewehr 1888. It was sold to the Francis Bannerman company at some point around 1900, as part of a big batch of surplus weapons (Bannerman was a massive international dealer in arms and military equipment). Moving ahead a few years, World War One breaks out and prompts the organization of a couple Canadian “Home Guard” units. The Montreal Home Guard has some money, and buys a batch of Savage Model 99 lever action rifles (in .303 Savage, interestingly). The Quebec Home Guard isn’t quite so well-heeled, so they go to Bannerman to see what they can afford. Bannerman sells them a batch of Gewehr 71/84 tube-magazine repeating rifles, in the same configuration as when they were sold off by the German military.
Incidentally, I believe these become the only Mauser rifles formally purchased and issued by the Canadian government, when they are acquired by the Home Guard. At any rate, after the war ends, a subset of those old rifles are given to the Quebec Papal Zouaves, a ceremonial vestige of the Quebecois military volunteers who went to Italy in the 1860s to help defend the Papacy during Italian unification. By this time, the Zouaves are basically just acting as guards in parades, and they crudely cut down the 71/84s, removed their magazines, and fit them with cut-down British Snider bayonets for use as single-shot, blank-firing arms.
Quite the journey, right? And also a reminder that sometimes what looks like sporterized junk is actually something with distinct historical provenance …
Many thanks to Mike Carrick of Arms Heritage Magazine for providing me access to film this example!
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Sep 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
While the Indian Army was looked down upon by much of the British military, it saw much more combat service than its European counterpart. The Indian Army was actually faster than the British to recognize and adopt a number of small arms improvements, and the CLLE MkI India Pattern is a good example.
When the mobile charger guide was first adopted by the British military, no effort was made to retrofit earlier rifles with it. The Indians, however, saw the advantage and began to convert Long Lees to the Charger-Loading configuration as early as 1905. Between then and 1909, some 22,000 of these MkI I.P. rifles were assembled at the Ishapore Arsenal. Following the adoption of the fixed charger bridge, a MkII I.P. became the new standard, with the fixed guide instead of the mobile one.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Sep 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
The saga of how the original Stemple 76/45 became the Stemple Takedown Gun is a fantastic story of engineering design choices.
Essentially, John Stemple began by building a rather crude copy of the Swedish K in .45 ACP in the mid 1980s, called the Stemple 76/45. He produced and registered 2,000 transferrable receivers for the gun (pre-1986), but only built them slowly, a few at a time. In the late 1980s he faced criminal charges from ATF, and transferred the receivers to a friend while he (successfully) fought the charges. When he went to get the receivers back, his friend refused, and the two entered into a nearly decade-long legal battle over them.
By the time Stemple eventually won the case, he recovered about 900 transferrable tubes. By this time (circa 2000) these tube receivers were much more valuable than when he first made them, as the machine gun registry was closed in 1986 and new ones can no longer be made. At this point, Stemple reached out to Brian Poling (BRP Corp) to act as a subcontractor to make the parts for the Stemple 76/45. But Poling had a better idea …
Poling’s thought was to instead design a new gun that would be much more desirable as a recreational gun than the 76/45. He envisioned something controllable, low recoil, and using large drum magazines. Such a gun would be a lot more fun at the range than the MACs and Uzis that tended to dominate the submachine gun market at the time. In addition, Poling’s gun would be designed specifically to protect the irreplaceable registered receiver tubes from wear or damage. The result was the STG-76 — the Stemple Takedown Gun.
In order to remain legal, the STG-76 had to leave the original 76/45 receiver tube cutouts unmodified, so as not to change the configuration of the receiver itself. Poling designed a replaceable internal trunnion and slip-over magazine well, allowing multiple different calibers and magazine configurations. The internals were closely based on the Finnish kp31 Suomi, for which parts kits became readily available in the early 2000s. This also facilitated the use of Suomi 71-round drum magazines. The original STF-76 design also included a bipod for easy shooting, and a grip and stock from an HK91 or CETME Model C for comfortable handling (instead of the terrible metal strut stocks common to most budget SMGs).
Several other interesting configurations would follow (stay tuned for those videos), and the guns remain available brand new to this day. The original supply of receivers is sufficient for production until about 2023 …
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Sep 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
There were many different versions of the Ross straight-pull bolt action rifle made and adopted by the Canadian military. However, the version that Sir Charles Ross thought would be best was only ever made as a small run of prototypes. This rifle was called the Military Match M10, in .280 Ross caliber.
The .280 Ross was a powerful cartridge on par with 7mm Remington Magnum, firing a 140 grain bullet at 3000 fps. This made it very flat-shooting, which Ross saw as ideal for minimizing range estimation errors. Ross’ military experience had been in the Boer War, where long range individual marksmanship was perhaps as important as in any other modern military conflict. For his ideal rifle, he used his M1910 action with a Mauser-style 5-round double-column flush magazine, a finely adjustable rear sight with an aperture for precision shooting but also a notch sight for snap shots. He gave a it a 26 inch barrel — longer than many of the rifles being adopted in the early 1900s, but long enough to have good ballistics and a very long sight radius.
Ross presented his rifle to the Canadian and British militaries, but it was not accepted, because of the British retention of the .303 cartridge if for no other reason. Only about two dozen were made, with serial numbers in the 102XX range. Only perhaps half of those still exist today, and it’s a rare treat to be able to examine this one!
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
Forgotten Weapons
Published 14 Sep 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
In July of 1918, the British military formally adopted a Parker-Hale system of adapting .303-caliber arms to .22 rimfire for short range training. The system involved lining standard barrels with .22 caliber blanks that were machined with full size .303 chambers. Special cartridge inserts were used which had the external dimensions of .303 cartridges, but held .22LR cartridges inside. This allowed the weapon to use the same feeding system as it normally would, and to duplicate the handling and trigger mechanism of a standard .303 caliber gun while only firing a small rimfire cartridge.
Parker-Hale built kits of this type for the Lee Enfield rifle, the Lewis LMG, and the Vickers HMG, and all were used by the British military. In the Lewis and Vickers, there was no accommodation made to actually cycle the guns; this sort of .22 practice drill was done by manually cycling the actions after each shot. Still, it was a good way to practice basic drill (loading, unloading, etc) as well as basic marksmanship without the noise of full power cartridges and without the need for a full-power-rated backstop.
The system for the Lee Enfield was replaced in 1920 (after only about 2 years of use) with the No2 MkIV* rifle, a dedicated .22 conversion of an SMLE. Parker-Hale kept the system in their commercial catalog into the 1930s, however.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Sep 2021http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.forgottenweapons.com
The British Royal Navy tended to accumulate some of the obsolescent patterns of Enfield rifles around the turn of the 19th century, as the Army had higher priority for the new types of rifle. This resulted in a rather odd and poorly-documented pattern, the Charger-Loading Lee Enfield (CLLE) MkI Naval.
Produced around 1910-1912, these guns began as original production Long Lee (or Metford) rifles. In 1910, the new MkVII high velocity Spitzer ammunition was adopted, and it was largely issued on charger clips for use in the new SMLE rifles. The Royal Navy decided that it wanted to be able to use this ammunition, and so it converted some (exact numbers are unclear) of the old Long Lees with a mishmash of updates.
The rear sights were recalibrated for MkVII ammunition, but not changed in style. So, no windage adjustment was possible on either the front or rear.
A charger bridge was added, including a channel cut to allow a sight picture on the old-style sights. This also involved removing the early pattern dust covers on the bolts.
The resulting guns were marked “HV” for “high velocity” in front of their rear sights. The right side of the receiver socket retained the original production markings, and “CLLE MkI” was added to the left side of the sockets.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle 36270
Tucson, AZ 85740
Forgotten Weapons
Published 21 Nov 2018https://www.forgottenweapons.com/isha…
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
In 1943, the British government began a program to develop a shortened and lightened version of the No1 SMLE rifle, for production in India and Australia — where the national ordnance factories had not converted to production of the No4 rifle. This prototype is the first pattern produced by the Ishapore Arsenal for testing. Its barrel is cut down to 16.5 inches (plus a 2.8 inch long conical flash hider), it has a unique 3-position flag style of rear aperture sight, and has had its sling swivels repositioned. This rifle was tested in the UK, and some modifications were recommended. A second pattern from Ishapore was then provisionally approved as the No6 MkI on September 1st, 1944, but cancelled before production could begin. The Australian pattern of No6 was approved a year late in September 1945, but then declared obsolete before it could be put into production. With the end of World War Two and Indian independence in 1947, the funding and impetus for a new short rifle were lost, and instead Ishapore would end up converting its production to No1 pattern rifles in 7.62mm NATO a few years later.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Dec 2017http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
The Mk18 Mod0 grenade launchers was developed by the Honeywell corporation in 1962, and was the first weapon in what would became a category of high volume grenade launchers used by the US military. The modern iterations are all self-loading, but this first example was fired by a manual crank handle, like a Gatling gun. The Mk18 used the same 40x46mm grenade cartridge as the single shot M79 launcher, and this round’s low pressure allowed the Mk18 to use a rather unusual breech mechanism.
Unlike most belt-fed weapons, the cartridges in the Mk18 never left the belt. Instead, the breech consisted of two rotating spindles which would form the top and bottom halves of the chamber, closing around each shell as the handle was cranked. As a result, a loaded belt of grenades fed into the weapon, and a belt of empty cases came out the other side. Another effect of the low pressure cartridge was a rather short effective range, which limited adoption of the weapon to the US Navy, which bought 1200 and used them primarily on riverine patrol boats. In this application, the short effective range was not much of a hindrance, and the volume of high explosive firepower was a significant asset.
Armament Research Services (ARES) is a specialist technical intelligence consultancy, offering expertise and analysis to a range of government and non-government entities in the arms and munitions field. For detailed photos of this very cool early grenade launcher, don’t miss the ARES companion blog post:
Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…
Powered by WordPress