Select-fire Rifles
EM1 Photos and Manual
The EM1 was an experimental British rifle developed in the late 1940s, and was definitely the high-tech wonder rifle of its day. It was a bullpup-style design before that was a trend, and used a […]
Articles by Ian McCollum
Book review
Book Review: The Gatling Gun by Wahl and Toppel
I contracted a nasty cold this past weekend, and as a result my voice sounds like I’ve spent a lifetime drinking moonshine and smoking unfiltered Luckys – so today’s book review will be written rather […]
Semiauto Rifles
Pelo Rifle
Captain Carl Pelo (retired) of the Finnish Army was involved in arms design for twenty or thirty years (including a stint as technical manager of the Sako factory in the 1930s), and produced several prototype […]
Uncategorized
What Are Museums For?
We visited a number of major museums while we were in Europe – the Paris Musee de Armee, the Belgian War Museum, and the London Imperial War Museum in particular. Maybe I’m spoiled, but I […]
Semiauto Rifles
Shooting the Gustloff VG1-5
Edit: Sorry, guys! I managed to link to an unrelated video. It’s fixed now. 🙂 The Volksturmgewehr Gustloff (commonly and incorrectly called the VG1-5) was a last-ditch rifle developed by Germany at the end of […]
Artillery
Vintage Saturday: 2.95″ Vickers Mountain Gun
An American crew with a Vickers Sons & Maxim 2.95″ Mountain Gun in the Philippines. These were pressed into service against the Japanese as late as WWII…
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Nepalese Gahendra lineage
As you may recall, I picked up a Nepalese “Gahendra” rifle from IMA as a gunsmithing project, which turned out to be more complicated than I’d planned on. Well, I’ve been doing a bit of […]
Book review
Book Review: The Colt Model 1905
Today we’re looking at John Potocki’s excellent reference work, The Colt 1905 Automatic Pistol. Not much doubt what the subject is, right? The development of John Browning’s iconic 1911 pistol is generally not much discussed, […]
Prototype
Caseless ammunition demo action
The US Army (as well as other armed forces) has experimented with a bunch of interesting arms design ideas, and one that keeps coming back to the surface is the use of caseless ammunition. The […]
Uncategorized
Our Triumphant Return!
We’re back! We arrived in the US late last night from an absolutely outstanding three weeks in western Europe (France, Belgium, and the UK). We spent almost the entire trip visiting great collections and very […]