Forgotten Weapons
Published Nov 22, 2023FN played a role in the production of Polish wz.28 BARs, and in the process obtained a copy of the technical package for the weapon, and converted it to metric measurements. Under the supervision of Dieudonne Saive, this was used as the basis for FN’s own BAR production, called the Modelé 30. Production was done with a license from Colt, who owned the rights to Browning’s patents on the BAR.
The Model 30 was basically a Colt R75 (Model 1925), but incorporated a few improvements. Most significantly, the male and female parts of the gas system were swapped, which prevented carbon from building up and eventually jamming the gas piston. In addition, the bolt removal latch was improved from the US pattern, and the Polish wz.28-style rear sight was used. Lastly, a rate-reduction mechanism on the fire control group gave the gun “slow” and “fast” settings, of roughly 350rpm and 600rpm instead of the traditional semi and full auto settings.
Production began in 7.65mm, and the Belgian Army adopted the weapon, taking deliveries from 1930 until occupation in 1940. The Model 30 was also made in 8mm Mauser, and exported to China and Ethiopia. The design was fairly quickly supplanted in 1932 by the FN Modelé D, which added a quick-change barrel mechanism to the design, and this pattern sold more widely.
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February 26, 2024
FN Model 30: The First Belgian BAR
February 2, 2024
J.M. Browning Harmonica Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published Sep 6, 2015Have you heard of Jonathan Browning, gunsmith and inventor? Among his other accomplishments, he is credited with designing the harmonica rifle in the US — and we have an example of one of his hand-made guns here to look at today (made in 1853). Browning was a Mormon, and spent several years slowly moving west periodically setting up gunsmithing shops before he reached his final destination of Ogden, Utah. There he settled down for good, and had 22 children with his 3 wives. One of those children also showed an aptitude for gunsmithing, and formally apprenticed to his father. You might recognize his name …
November 1, 2023
The BAR M1918A3 by Ohio Ordnance – Shooting and Mechanism
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Jul 2014Today we’re looking at one of Ohio Ordnance’s semiauto M1918A3 BARs – how it shoots, how it works, and what the pros and cons of the military BAR variants were in World War I and World War II.
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October 16, 2023
Remington Model 8 (in .25 Remington)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Feb 2014The Remington Model 8 (and the 81, which is mechanically identical) was an early self-loading rifle design by John Browning, and was produced from 1906 into the 1950s. It was available in 4 calibers initially, all of them being rimless, bottlenecked proprietary jobs — the .25, .30, .32, and .35 Remington. The .35 was the most effective on game and was the most popular seller, with the .25 being the least popular. When the Model 81 was introduced (with a heavier forestock and semi pistol grip), it was also made available in .300 Savage. At that time, the Remington factory also offered to rebarrel existing Model 8s for the .300 Savage cartridge.
The Model 8 was a long-recoil design, something that saw little further development and remains one of the least-common types of action. It is interesting to compare the Remington 8 to the Winchester 1905/07/10 series of rifles that came on the market at almost the same time. Both were well-made and effective self-loaders, but with much different target markets and mechanical systems. Winchester opted to make a replacement for the pistol-caliber lever action saddle rifle, and did so using a simple and somewhat brute-force operating system: direct blowback with a heavy bolt and recoil spring. Remington, on the other hand, wanted to make a big-game rifle with very fast follow-up shot capability, and used the far more complex long recoil locked breech system. Both guns are largely forgotten by the gun-owning public today, although they both were widely used and appreciated by hunters for decades.
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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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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.
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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 …
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January 18, 2023
Ask Ian: Why No German WW2 50-Cal Machine Guns? (feat. Nick Moran)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 20 Sep 2022From Nathaniel on Patreon:
“Why didn’t Germany or Axis powers have a machine gun similar to the American M2?”Basically, because everyone faced the choice of a .50 caliber machine gun or 20mm (or larger) cannons for anti-aircraft use, and most people chose the cannons — including Germany. There were some .50 caliber machine guns adopted by Axis powers, most notably the Hotchkiss 1930, a magazine-fed 13.2mm gun that was used by both Italy and Japan (among others). However, the use of the .50 caliber M2 by the US was really a logistical holdover form the interwar period. The M2 remained in production because it was adopted by US Coastal Artillery as a water-cooled anti-aircraft gun, and commercial sales by Colt were slim but sufficient to keep the gun in development through the 20s and 30s. It was used as a main armament in early American armor, but obsolete in this role when the war broke out.
However, with the gun in production and no obvious domestic 20mm design, the US chose to simply make an astounding number of M2s and just dump them everywhere, from Jeeps to trucks to halftracks to tanks to self-propelled guns. And that’s not considering the 75% of production that went to coaxial and aircraft versions …
Anyway, back to the question. The German choice for antiaircraft use was the 20mm and 37mm Flak systems, and not a .50 MG on every tank turret. And so, there was really no motive to develop such a gun. The Soviets did choose to go the US route, though, and developed the DShK-38 for the same role as the US M2 — although it was made in only a tiny fraction of the quantity of the M2.
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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.
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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 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.
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October 27, 2022
Tamara Keel reviews the new FN High Power pistol
These days, thanks to both financial and legal limitations, there’s no chance I’ll ever own either an original Browning Hi Power or the new FN High Power, but I can still dream about ’em:
Browning High Power 9mm, the standard side-arm of the Canadian army from WW2 until its replacements start to arrive some time in 2023.
Let me state this up front: I’m a proud American. I love baseball and apple pie. If you cut me, I bleed red, white and blue. Whichever Detroit automaker you think is best, I think they are, too. And, therefore, I am a loyal fan of John Moses Browning’s M1911.
But, with that out of the way, it pains me to admit that the 1911 wasn’t Browning’s most important or influential pistol design. The 1911 is largely an American obsession, and when the rest of the world thinks about JMB’s martial handguns, the one that springs to mind is the Fabrique Nationale GP35, better known as the FN Hi Power.
Actually the result of a collaboration between Browning and his successor at FN, the great Dieudonné Saive, the Hi Power is one of the most prolific service pistols ever created, being used by the militaries of half a hundred countries.
Though it had some features that made it cheaper and easier to produce than the M1911, such as the fixed, under-barrel cam that replaced the swinging link on the older design, the Hi Power was still expensive to produce compared to newer designs. Even the change to a simpler external extractor in the 1960s wasn’t enough to keep it competitive, cost-wise, for budget-conscious militaries, and its double-stack, 13-round mag — a revelation in the 1930s — was by now commonplace.
Browning (an FN subsidiary) finally ended production a few years ago, but it turned out that demand for the Hi Power still existed.
EAA began selling a Turkish-made clone recently, and Springfield Armory upped the ante with the SA-35, which offered some minor tweaks to the original design.
Early this year, though, FN America went nuclear on the Hi Power market by offering the all-new, American-made High Power.
Note the spelling change, because this isn’t your granddad’s Hi Power.
“Controls are ambidextrous. A thumb-safety lever and a slide-stop lever can be found on either side of the new High Power, and the magazine release is reversible • While not interchangeable with the older unit on the left, the new magazines are more capacious • The mag well is expectedly wide and promotes fast reloads • The topstrap is smooth, but the semi-matte PVD finish prevents glare • The trigger is a great improvement over the original, thanks in part to the absence of a magazine-disconnect safety • Removing the slide is simple, but you have to control it against the tension of the recoil spring.”
Photos from Shooting Illustrated, most likely by Tamara Keel.
September 21, 2022
Radom’s Vis 35: Poland’s Excellent Automatic Pistol
Forgotten Weapons
Published 9 Feb 2016In the 1920s Poland began looking for a new standard military pistol, and tested a variety of compact .380s. The representative from FN brought along an early iteration of the High Power (along with their other entry) even though it was much too large and heavy to meet the Polish requirements. After a couple iterations of testing, it became clear to the Polish Ordnance officers that the High Power was a much more effective service pistol than the compact guns they had been instructed to look for.
Lo and behold, the ultimate choice was a domestic design based largely on the High Power (a direct deal with FN was not an option after Poland’s relationship with FN had suffered through problems with the wz.28 version of the BAR). Toss in a delay to redesign the early decocking mechanism to satisfy the Cavalry (who didn’t realize that the decocker wasn’t actually meant to be used, but rather to just add another claim to the patent), and by 1935 the pistol was finished and formally adopted.
The Vis 35 is one of the best automatic pistols of WWII in terms of both handling and quality. In total 46,000 were made pre-war for Poland’s military, and German occupation forces built another 300,000+ during the war.
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August 8, 2022
FN-DA1: The BAR for NATO
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Apr 2022After World War Two, FN put the BAR back into production. This was initially the FN-D version with a quick-change barrel, but with NATO’s adoption of the 7.62mm cartridge, there was a demand for the BAR in that chambering. The Belgian Army adopted this new round, and plenty of other nations did as well. This prompted FN to release a new version of the FN-D for it, designated the FN-DA1.
In addition to the new chambering, the DA1 also had these three changes:
– Larger bipod feet and a wider bipod stance
– A rear aperture sight instead of an open notch
– A more protected barrel release latchThe FN-DA1 would remain in production until 1967, when it was finally discontinued.
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April 24, 2022
Colt Model 1929 Prototype .276 Rifle, by Ed Browning
Forgotten Weapons
Published 22 Jul 2016http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
https://centerofthewest.org/explore/f…On October 1, 1928, the US War Department published a request for semiautomatic rifle designs. The Colt company submitted this .276 caliber rifle to the ensuing trials in 1929. It was designed by Jonathan Edward “Ed” Browning (half brother of John Moses Browning) and was a recoil-operated, tilting bolt design weighing 9lb 9oz and using 108 parts. The tilting bolt system was derived from the 1911 pistol system as designed by John Moses Browning, and the operating system also used an accelerator reminiscent of JMB’s Model 1917 and 1919 machine guns.
After the trials, the Colt 1929 rifle was deemed unfit for further testing by the Ordnance Department because of poor feeding, poor cooling ability, an overly long receiver and short barrel, too many parts, and being too heavy overall. Ed Browning would take the design back to his workshop and continue working on it, eventually replacing the short recoil operating system with an annular gas piston, and bringing it to the Winchester company in the late 1930s.
