Competition
Suomi vs Stemple-Suomi: How Close Are They?
Yesterday we took a look at the Stemple-Suomi on the bench – today it’s time to find how similar it is in handling to the real thing! I have a Danish M41 Suomi, a Stemple-Suomi, […]
Finland
Conversion
BRP Recreates a Classic: the Stemple-Suomi
When the Stemple STG-76 was designed, it used internal parts from the Finnish kp/31 Suomi submachine gun. Since the whole point of the Stemple was to have a modular and interchangeable gun, it would make […]
Select-fire Rifles
Qatari Royal Guard m/71-76 Valmet
The Valmet company in Finland made excellent AK-type rifles for the Finnish Defense Forces, but also offered a variety of designs on the international commercial market. The Valmet was a very expensive rifle for a […]
Light MGs
L-34 Sampo: Aimo Lahti’s Rejected Masterpiece
Finland’s standard light machine gun going into the Winter War was the LS-26, a gun which did not succeed in field use. It was complex and cumbersome, and Finnish troops quickly replaced it with captured […]
Prototype
Captain Carl Pelo’s Model 1954 Prototype Semiauto Rifle
Carl Pelo was a an engineer with Sako in the 1930s, and developed a series of self-loading rifles. He used a short recoil mechanism with a pair of locking flaps on the bolt, much like […]
Semiauto pistol
Finland’s First Domestic Handgun: the Ahlberg
In the wake of Finland gaining its independence, small arms were much in demand for the armed forces. Many rifles had been taken from Russian stockpiles in Finland, but not many handguns. Hugo Ahlberg ran […]
Vehicle
Tank Driving in Finland: Piglet and the T55
We were going to have a couple serious military vehicles as range props for Finnish Brutality back in February, but with the match postponed because of covid restrictions that didn’t come to pass. However, Jari […]
General Purpose MGs
DS-39: The Failed Soviet Machine Gun of World War Two
The Soviet Union recognized the need for a modernized machine gun to replace the Maxim, and in the late 1920s Degtyarev began work on a “universal” type of gun. This would be air cooled, use […]
Semiauto pistol
The Lahti L35 in Soviet Testing
This guest article written by Andrey Ulanov. In 1941, at the NIPSVO shooting range, the Soviet military conducted a series of comparative tests of standard foreign and Soviet pistols as well as the Soviet experimental […]
Semiauto pistol
The Luger in Finland
After the failure of the domestic production Ahlberg pistols and some disappointment with the performance of surplus French Ruby pistols, the Finnish military turned to DWM in Germany for a main service pistol in 1922. […]