Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Nov 2014Colonel LeMat is best known for his 9-shot muzzleloading .42 caliber revolver with its 20 gauge shot barrel acting as cylinder axis pin — several thousand of these revolvers were imported and used in the field by Confederate officers during the US Civil War (and modern reproductions are available as well). What are less well-known are the pinfire and centerfire versions of LeMat’s revolver, and the carbine variants as well.
In this video I’m taking a look at a centerfire LeMat revolver and a centerfire LeMat carbine, both extremely rare guns. They use the same basic principles as the early muzzleloading guns, but look quite different. In these guns, the shotgun remains 20 gauge but uses a self-contained shell loaded from the rear, and the 9 rifles shots are designed for an 11mm (.44 caliber) cartridge very similar to that used in the French 1873 service revolver.
(more…)
April 11, 2023
LeMat Centerfire Pistol and Carbine
QotD: Being the target of a death threat
It is now about fourteen months since, after receiving my second death threat, I started carrying a firearm almost constantly. This experience has taught me a few truths, some merely amusing but others with larger implications.
[…]
And about that security plan: carrying a firearm is nearly useless without very specific kinds of mental preparation. It’s not just that you have to think through large ethical issues about when to draw and when to fire (equivalently, when to threaten lethal force and when to use it). You also need good defensive habits of mind. Carrying a firearm is no good if an adversary wins the engagement before you have time to draw.
The most basic good habit of mind is maintaining awareness of your tactical environment. From what directions could you be attacked? Is there a way for an assailant to come up behind you for a hand-to-hand assault, or to line up a shooting position from beyond hand-to-hand range where you couldn’t see it? Are you exposed through nearby windows?
One advantage I had going in was reading Robert Heinlein as a child. This meant I soaked up some basic tactical doctrine through my pores. Like: when you go to a restaurant, sit with your back to a wall, preferably in a corner, in a place with good sightlines but not near a window. When you sit down, think about possible threat axes and which direction to bail out in if you have to.
Advice I’ve gotten from people with counterterrorism training includes this lesson: watch your environment and trust your instincts. Terrorists, criminals, and crazies don’t tend to blend in well even when they’re trying. If someone nearby looks or feels out of place in your surroundings, or behaves in a way not appropriate to the setting, pay attention to that; check your escape routes and make sure you can reach your weapons quickly.
How careful you have to be depends on the threat model you’re planning against. I’m not going to talk about mine in detail, because that might compromise my security by telling bad guys what expectations to game against. But I will say that it assigns a vanishingly small probability to professionals with scoped rifles; the background culture of both Iranian terrorists and their Arab proxies makes it extremely difficult for them to train or recruit snipers, and I am reliably informed that the Iranians couldn’t run professional hit teams in the U.S. anyway – too difficult to exfiltrate them, among other problems.
This, along with some other aspects of the threat model I won’t discuss, narrows the range of plausible threats to something an armed and trained individual with good backup from law enforcement has a reasonable hope to be able to counter. And the good backup from law enforcement is not a trivial detail; real life is not a Soldier of Fortune story or a running-man thriller, and a sane security plan uses all the resources available from your connections to the society around you.
Eric S. Raymond, “Fourteen months of carrying”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-09-21.
March 30, 2023
FN’s Millionth Pistol: Presented to John Browning; Saved by a Belgian Cop
Forgotten Weapons
Published 28 Nov 2022Fabrique Nationale was formed as a consortium of small gunmakers to produce Mauser rifles for the Belgian Army, and when that work was complete the company basically had nothing else to do … until they met John Browning. Browning had a new pistol design and needed a manufacturer — and FN happened to be a manufacturer in need of a new design. The resulting partnership would last until Browning’s death decades later, and essentially created the modern FN that we know today.
FN produced its one millionth Browning pistol on July 15th, 1912 and decided to throw a huge party in recognition of the achievement. It would take 18 months to get everything arranged, and the gala was held on January 31st, 1914. John Browning attended, along with his son Val, several Belgian government ministers, and FN’s international sales agents. As part of the festivities, a number of Baby Browning pistols marked “Un Million” were presented to VIPs, and Browning himself was given this Model 1900 with a gold engraved serial number “1,000,000”. It’s worth noting that FN did not actually make a million Model 1899/1900 pistols — those only reached about 725,000. The one million number included production of later models, like the Baby Browning and FN 1910.
Browning was not particularly interested in commemorative guns, and gave the pistol to his notary in Bruges when he left to return to the US. It remained with that man until his death, when it because his widow’s property. When the Belgian government passed a gun registration law in 1945, she duly registered it — and that record remains. It was registered again in 1985 in the new computerized Belgian system (listed as a revolver; gun registries are always notoriously full of errors). In 2006 Belgian gun laws changed again, and many guns had to be surrendered to the police. This pistol was one of them; handed in for destruction to a local police office. Fortunately, the officer who received it recognized that it was a historically significant piece, and was able to arrange its preservation.
(more…)
February 26, 2023
Ortgies Automatic Pistols: Not as Boring as You Think!
Forgotten Weapons
Published 16 Jun 2016The Ortgies is a pistol whose interesting aspects are often overlooked on the assumption that it is just another identical .32 ACP blowback pistol. Well, it is that — but it is also more.
Mechanically, the Ortgies has a rather unusual grip safety mechanism that is quite different from what we expect to see today. It is also interesting in that the .32 and .380 versions differ only in the easily-interchanged barrel — even the magazines are marked for both calibers.
However, the most interesting part of the Ortgies story (in my opinion) is its production. In less than 5 full years (1919-1923), close to a half million of these guns were made, primarily by an industrial subsidiary of the German government. The guns were in large part a work program, creating export goods which could bring desperately needed hard currency into Germany to counteract the economic devastation of the Versailles treaty.
Have a look at the video and you may come away with a newfound appreciation for the humble Ortgies, like I did!
(more…)
January 24, 2023
What Would Browning Do: FN’s New High Power
Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Sept 2022It seems like everyone is making a copy of the Browning High Power these days, and FN themselves have jumped into the arena as well. What FN is making isn’t just a clone of the original pistol, though — they have built something largely new, taking inspiration and design cues from the original BHP to create a gun more suited to 2022 than 1935.
While the original High Power (or Hi Power, depending on what era you are looking at) is lovingly romanticized by many — and I totally understand why — it has a number of significant shortcomings by today’s standards. It doesn’t feed hollow points well. The triggers are often bad, in part because of the magazine safety. The sights are tiny. The capacity is underwhelming. And most significantly to me, they tend to have bloody hammer bite, forcing you to take a low grip or just suffer through.
The new FN High Power looks to have fixed all of that. It’s a bigger pistol, but it offers a much more comfortable grip, modern style sights, a very nice single action trigger, and 17 round capacity (it does not interchange magazines with the original BHP). Let’s take a closer look at what FN did, and why …
(more…)
January 21, 2023
Ask Ian: Liberators or Cobray Terminators for the Elbonian Resistance?
Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Sept 2022From Jon on Patreon:
“Elbonia has been occupied by an enemy force. Do you sabotage their resistance by airdropping them Liberator pistols or Cobray Terminators?”To my mind, the Liberator is a substantially more useful resistance weapons, so I would supply Elbonia with lots of crates of Cobray Terminators. Why?
First, the Liberator is concealable. Historically, lots of resistance action requires hiding a small weapons. It’s not all forest encampments and ambushes.
Second, the Liberator is more effective. It uses a .45ACP pistol cartridge. The smooth barrel and atrocious sights certainly limit its utility, but if you actually hit someone with it, it will do the job. Most of the shotgun ammunition available to a resistance organization will be the most common sort of sporting ammunition, which is birdshot. Birdshot is very ineffective against people at anything but absolutely point-blank range.
Third, it is much simpler to fabricate a single-shot shotgun than a compact pistol. The Elbonian Resistance wouldn’t have much trouble making something like a Richardson Guerrilla Gun, so supplying them with Terminators doesn’t actually give them much that they couldn’t get already.
(more…)
January 14, 2023
Star Megastar: Spain’s Massive 10mm Autopistol
Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 Sep 2022In the late 1980s, the Spanish gun maker Star decided to join the new hot trend of 10mm semiauto pistols. The cartridge was getting a lot of press, and Star saw this as an opportunity to ride the wave and also the get a pistol on the market that would attract IPSC competitors. Unlike some companies adapting existing .45ACP designs to 10mm, Star decided to start from scratch to build a pistol that was massive and durable; able to handle the power of the cartridge without any worries.
Star engineer Eduardo Zamacola (who had previously designed the M38/30/31 series for Star) had the first prototypes ready in 1990, in both 10mm Auto and .45 ACP. The design took cues from the Petter designs of France and SIG, with full-length internal slide rails and a removable modular fire control system. It offered 12 round capacity in .45 and 14 rounds in 10mm.
The pistol was quite massive and heavy (1.4kg / 3.1 lb), and failed to sell well from the start. The 10mm craze flared out rather quickly — it remains a niche cartridge to this day, despite periodic releases of new 10mm pistols (the SIG 320 in 10mm being the most recent). What really killed the Megastar, though, was the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban in the US. This prohibited new magazines holding more than 10 rounds, and the whole point of the bulk of the Megastar was to allow larger double-stack magazines. With those no longer available, there was really not much reason to get a Megastar instead of something like a 1911. In total, just 978 were made in 10mm and 5,424 in .45ACP, with production ending in 1995.
(more…)
December 31, 2022
Tour of the AREX Defense Factory in Slovenia
Forgotten Weapons
Published 30 Aug 2022During my visit to Slovenia, I had a chance to tour the AREX Defense factory in Šentjernej. I came away really impressed by the quality and the breadth of operations that the factory performs in-house. They have only been making their own handgun designs for about 5 years, but they have been a subcontractor making parts for other big-name companies (like FN) for decades.
(more…)
December 18, 2022
Belgian GP-35: Pre-War Browning High Power Complete Rig
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Aug 2022The Browning High Power (“Grande Puissance“, aka GP-35) was developed by Fabrique National in Belgium, designed primarily by John Browning’s apprentice Dieudonné Saive. It began in the very early 1920s as a pistol designed for a new French Army requirement, but eventually split into two separate development tracks. By the early 1930s the French procurement process was still ongoing, but FN felt that the current iteration of their pistol (the Grand Rendement) was sufficiently mature to be a viable military sidearm. They began offering it for sale, and the Belgian Army quickly took an interest. One thousand were purchased for Belgian field trials in 1933, and with a few minor changes it was adopted by Belgium as the GP-35 in 1935.
The first guns are delivered in May of 1935, and the first troops to receive them were troops like machine gun crews, tank crews, messengers and other men who needed a weapon, but not a full-length rifle. By 1938 enough have been delivered that the specialty troops and NCOs have been fully equipped, and guns begin to go to officers, replacing things like the FN Model 1900. By the time of the German invasion in May 1940, some 30,000 — 35,000 High Powers had been delivered to the Belgian Army. In addition to this, several other military contracts were made by FN, selling the pistol to Estonia, Lithuania, Paraguay, China, and Finland. However, the Belgian orders account for the significant majority of all pre-war made High Powers.
Note that in the US, original pre-war High Powers with original stocks, 500-meter tangent sights, and serial numbers below 47,000 (no prefix) are exempted from the NFA, and are not legally considered short-barreled rifles.
(more…)
December 12, 2022
Before the High Power was the FN Grand Rendement
Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Aug 2022The Browning High Power story begins with a French 1921 request for a new military pistol. FN engineer Dieudonné Saive developed a double stack, single feed magazine and John Browning adapted a Browning 1903 pistol to use it, and this was sent to France for consideration. This pistol worked well enough, but the French trials board requested changes … and they would continue requesting changes and more trials for the next decade.
By 1931, FN felt that the current iteration of the pistol — while still not meeting all the French requirements — was good enough to stand on its own as a service pistol for the Belgian Army and other clients. They named it the “Grand Rendement” (High Efficiency) and began marketing it. The Belgian Army showed a definite interest, and bought 1,000 pistols for field trials, based on the prototype example we have in today’s video. These would become the Grande Puissance, aka the High Power.
For more details on this and other FN Browning pistols, I highly recommend Anthony Vanderlinden’s FN Browning Pistols, soon to be released in its third edition:
November 26, 2022
The Volcanic: Smith & Wesson’s First Pistol
Forgotten Weapons
Published 18 Aug 2017The deep beginnings of the Volcanic go back to Walter Hunt’s Volitional Repeater, which became the Jennings repeating rifle, which then became the Smith-Jennings repeating rifle when Horace Smith was brought in to improve it. Smith was able to make it more commercially viable than the Jennings had been, but he recognized that the system needed significant changes to really become successful. He had met a fellow gun designer who had similar ideas, by the name of Daniel Wesson, and the two would spend a couple years developing and refining the system. In 1854 they thought it was ready for production, and formed the Smith & Wesson Company.
Included in the original company was a man named Courtland Palmer, who owned the patent rights to the Jennings system. Smith & Wesson’s system would probably have been deemed an infringement of Palmer’s patents, and by bringing him into the company they avoided legal trouble. The fact that he was a relatively wealthy financier of the new company certainly didn’t hurt!
The pistol that S&W started producing was a manually repeating one with a tubular magazine under the barrel holding either 6 or 10 rounds. It was available in the .41 caliber Navy model (note: not actually adopted by the Navy) and the .31 caliber pocket version. In this first iteration, both used iron frames, which were all engraved lightly. The prices were pretty steep, and the guns suffered from some reliability problems and a fundamental problem of underpowered ammunition (the .41 caliber had a muzzle velocity of just 260 fps / 79 m/s). However, they did offer a much greater level of rapid repeating firepower than the muzzle loading revolvers of the period, and gained some loyal fans. In total, just 1700 of the guns were produced before the company went bankrupt, about a year after forming.
To recover from that setback, they reformed the company into the new Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, and sold stock in the new company to generate a new supply of capital. This allowed them to get back into production, and the Volcanic company would make another 3000 pistols, all .41 caliber Navy types, before also running out of money 19 months later in 1856.
At this point, Smith and Wesson decide to move in another direction, and one of the main creditors of the Volcanic company was able to acquire all of its assets and put the guns into production a third time. The name of this creditor? None other than Oliver Winchester. Winchester puts a new infusion of his own money into the company under the name New Haven Arms Company. This company produces another 3300 guns, both large and small frame by 1861. The New Haven company comes very near to bankruptcy itself before finally changing the design to create the Henry repeating rifle. The Henry’s rimfire ammunition finally solved the reliability and power problems of the Volcanic, and became the starting point for Winchester to become one of the predominant American arms making companies.
(more…)
November 22, 2022
W+F Bern P43: A Swiss Take on the Browning High Power
Forgotten Weapons
Published 22 Jul 2017In 1940, Switzerland began a series of trials to replace their Luger service pistols with something equally high quality, but more economical. They had squeezed as much simplification out of the Luger as they could in 1929, and by this time the guns just needed to be replaced. The first 1940 trial had only two entrants (a Petter prototype from SIG and an Astra 900), but a second trial in 1941 included a large assortment of modern handguns, including a French 1935A, a Polish Vis-35, and prototypes from both SIG and W+F Bern.
One of the most tenacious competitors (aside form the winning SIG/Petter design) was the Bern factory’s series of Browning High Power copies. In this video, we will be looking at three progressive versions of this gun as they were modified through the course of the trials (which would last until 1949). While they are all mechanically very similar to the High Power, they will get progressively less visually similar as the trials progressed. In addition, we will see features like the slide lock, manual safety, and magazine release evolve and change.
(more…)
November 7, 2022
Ask Ian: Single Feed vs Double Feed Pistols
Forgotten Weapons
Published 5 Jul 2022Asked by Tyler on Patreon: “Why are there so few double stack/double feed handguns? I can only think of a couple off the top of my head. It makes the worst part of handgun shooting (loading the magazines) a complete non-issue.”
There are a series of interacting considerations when choosing between single feed and double feed.
Single Feed:
– Magazines are less reliable; constricting from two columns to one adds friction (this is magnified as capacity increases)
– Firearms are easier to design; the cartridge is always presented in the same place
– Pistol slides may be slightly narrowerDouble Feed:
– Magazines are more reliable (also less susceptible to a bit of dirt fouling them)
– Guns are harder to design; must accommodate two different feed positions
– Guns must be a bit wider (immaterial in rifles)These elements taken together lead to predominantly single feed magazines in pistols and double feed magazines in rifles, although exceptions exist to both.
(more…)
November 3, 2022
Is the AutoMag Curse Over? The New Auto Mag 180-D
Forgotten Weapons
Published 1 Jul 2022Historically speaking, the AutoMag 180 pistol has been a reaper of investors. Between 1971 and 1982, no fewer than six different companies went bankrupt trying to make a profit building Auto Mags. However, we may have finally reached the end of that streak …
In 2015, all the existing tools, parts, and IP related to the Auto Mag was sold to a new company (Auto Mag Ltd). Similar to the previous companies lured in by the glamour of this massive handgun, these new owners saw the list of existing parts (including several hundred frames) and figured they could assemble and sell a few hundred guns and make a nice return. Also similar to previous companies, they completed the deal and then discovered that those existing parts had major problems. Fundamentally, the Model 180 was simply not a mature design.
Where the new company has taken a new path is that they have spent the past 7 years reengineering the whole gun to fix its shortcomings. They have made a couple dozen design changes, although without changing anything fundamental in the appearance or operating principles of the gun. They have done things like lighten the firing pin, strengthen the locking lugs, tweak the magazine geometry, and so on — the changes that should have been make back in 1971 before the first example was ever shipped.
I came into this review with pretty low expectations — so many people have tried and failed to make a proper Automag that I really didn’t think Auto Mag Ltd would be able to pull it off. And yet to my happy surprise, it seems that they actually have. The gun ran flawlessly for me and was actually a lot of fun to shoot.
(more…)
October 29, 2022
The Canadian government, despite committing billions to replace old equipment, is still not serious about the Canadian Armed Forces
In The Line, Matt Gurney explains why — despite big-ticket items getting a few headlines — the Canadian Armed Forces need far more than what any government has been willing to provide since the start of the Cold War:
Objectively speaking, there has been progress. Canada has committed billions to replacing the CF-18 fighter jets with F-35s — 88 of them. (That’s still way too small an air fleet for a country our literal size — it’s not a lot of planes for such a big place, folks — but it’s something.) Billions more have been committed to modernizing NORAD’s early warning systems. And, miracle of miracles, we finally got around to replacing the goddamned Second World War-era pistols!
These are real, tangible things. These things matter. They will leave the Canadian Armed Forces better off, our soldiers better protected and our continent more secure. This is good news.
It’s also the bare minimum.
Even these big spending announcements, and even the itty bitty pistol one, don’t actually add capabilities to the Canadian military. They replace existing ones. They maintain our capabilities. Sure, we can quibble about “maintain” or “replace” — the F-35 will give Canada a stealth capacity it has never had before, and all that jazz. Fine. Fair. But it isn’t really adding to the overall list of missions we are capable of conducting. It’s fleshing out capabilities that, due to advanced age and wear-and-tear for our critical equipment, were starting to exist only on paper. The government deserves credit for this, but only a really small amount of credit. Getting the urgently necessary basics done, many years after they should have been handled, is good, but it’s not worth a pat on the back. It is the bare minimum the country deserved and that the military needed to function, so that’s how far I’ll go in my praise: congratulations, Liberals, on responding to a massive change in our geopolitical order by accomplishing the bare minimum that was already overdue.
If that sounds scathing, here’s the worst part: that’s me being sincere. Thanks for the bare minimum! I wasn’t sure we’d get even that
So yeah. Good, but … you see the problem here, no? In a new era of global instability and geopolitical turmoil, the Canadian response, thus far, has been to get caught up to where we should have been 10 years ago. At the latest. And it’s far from clear that, if not for Russia kicking off the largest conflict we’ve seen in Europe since 1945, we’d have even bothered to do these necessary, long-overdue things.
And this is all shaping up to be just the latest iteration of a little game both Liberals and Conservatives like to play with the Canadian Armed Forces (and, come to think of it, most policy files). They’ll point to specific investments or particular accomplishments when defending their record. And the investment and accomplishment may well be excellent indeed! But they won’t speak to the full, broader picture. And the full, broader picture of the Canadian Armed Forces is grim, and some new F-35s and 9mm pistols isn’t going to change that.
There was a little story last month you might have seen. After Hurricane Fiona wrecked big parts of several Atlantic provinces, the feds sent in the military. This is right and proper. The troops would have made a welcome sight in those communities, of course. What you might not have noticed, though, was that Nova Scotia had to go public with its desire for more troops. It asked for a thousand. It got 500. It kept asking for more. It got the 500. And most of those 500 were troops already stationed in Nova Scotia; only about 200 were actually sent in from elsewhere. The government never really commented on this, but it’s not hard to suss out the problem: the military couldn’t scrape together any more troops.
