Today I’m at B&T in Thun, Switzerland taking a look at the whole history of the company’s suppressors. They began back in the 90s when founder Karl Brügger was working as a machinist and had spare time available – so he started making silencers for himself and his friends. That grew into a small business, then a larger business getting contracts for Swiss police departments and making commercial sales, and eventually into the major industry player it is today. B&T is not the best-known name in the United States, but they have a long history of making OEM suppressors for major European arms companies like H&K.
Shotgun
Samuel Pauly Invents the Cartridge in 1812
https://youtu.be/BC7awTeuqRU This Pauly shotgun is lot #1346 at Morphy’s April 2019 auction. Samuel Johannes Pauli was born outside Bern, Switzerland in 1766, and became an engineer of wide interests. Among them were bridge design, passenger-carrying […]
Semiauto pistol
SIG Chylewski: One-Handed Vest Pocket Automatic
Designed by Witold Chylewski, this was only the second pistol manufactured by SIG (the first being the 6.5mm blow-forward 1894 MAnnlicher design). It was patented prior to WW1, but only after the war was Chylewski […]
Prototype
W+F Bern P43: A Swiss Take on the Browning High Power
In 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 […]
Had to check myself – 4.3mm, yep never adopted but interesting that B&T was making a suppressor for the HK 36. Great vid.
HK36 (not to be confused with Bundeswehr G36 which originally was called HK50 if I remember correctly) fired a 4.6 mm x 36 cartridge.
I was going to say that I wondered why the project was so short-lived but the energetics of that round probably tell the whole story. ~1k J v 5.56 @ 1.7k and my favorite “forgotten” 6.5 Grendle @ ~2.5k
12:09 – I think brain surgery might be easier than attaching this can?
😀