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Helical Magazines - II: The Evans Rifle
In our previous post, we'd studied the helical magazine, as invented by Calico Inc. in 1985. However, there is a precusor to this that was invented in the 19th century, called the Evans Repeating...
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Horizontal Magazines
In today's post, we will study a type of magazine that has been used on only a few firearm models so far. Today's subject of study will be the horizontal magazine.One of the well known weapons to use...
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Turret Magazines
In our last post, we looked at horizontal magazines. In today's post, we will look at a type of magazine that was used in the 19th century: the turret magazine.During the middle of the 19th century,...
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Ammunition Belts
We have been talking about magazines in the last few posts. In today's post, we will look at something that is not quite a magazine, but definitely holds ammunition. In today's post, we will study...
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Chain Guns - I
The previous article on the topic of ammunition belts prompted a vague recollection in your humble editor's mind of another feeding mechanism: chain guns. We will study them in today's post.A chain gun...
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Chain Guns - II
In our last post, we studied chain guns from the 19th century. In today's post, we will study modern chain guns.When we look at firearms throughout history, repeating firearms have been based on two...
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Feed Strips
In our last couple of posts, we studied some different ways that people feed machine guns with ammunition. In today's post, we will study another related way of feeding machine guns that was used by...
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Machine Guns - General
In our last few posts, we studied different feed systems such as ammunition belts, chain feeds and feed strips. All these mechanisms are generally used with machine guns. Therefore, in the next series...
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Early Machine Guns
In our last post, we looked at some basics about machine guns. In today's post, we will study some early developments in machine gun history and what technologies needed to be invented along with...
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Light Machine Guns
In our discussion about general features of machine guns, we discussed different classes of machine guns. Today, we will study the first of those classes, the light machine gun (often abbreviated as...
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Heavy Machine Guns - I
In our last post, we looked at light machine guns. In today's post, we will look at another class of machine guns, the Heavy Machine Gun (often abbreviated as HMG).In the late 1800s, there arose a need...
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Heavy Machine Guns - II
In our last post, we looked at the early developments in heavy machine guns and the work done by Hiram Maxim. We will continue our studies on this topic today.When we last left off, Hiram Maxim had...
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Heavy Machine Guns - III: Modern HMGs
In our last couple of posts about heavy machine guns, we saw that they were weapons designed to fire rifle cartridges for long periods of time. Since they were designed for firing in automatic mode for...
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Medium Machine Guns - I
In our last few posts, we looked at light machine guns and heavy machine guns. Briefly, a light machine gun fires intermediate-sized ammunition, comes with a bipod, operated by a single user and is...
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Medium Machine Guns - II
In our last post, we looked at the early beginnings of medium machine guns. We will continue to study this class of machine gun in this post.Before World War II, the German military came to the...
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General Purpose Machine Guns
In our last couple of posts, we looked at medium machine guns. In today's post, we will look at some developments in the General Purpose Machine Gun (GPMG) category (otherwise called Universal Machine...
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Steam Chests
A few posts ago, when we studied heavy machine guns, it was mentioned that one of the features of some of these machine guns is a jacket filled with water, which surrounds the barrel and helps to...
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Metals Used in Firearms - I
Over the years, we've briefly discussed the properties of some of the metals used to construct a firearm (such as here and here). In today's post, we will revisit the topic of metals used in firearm...
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In our last post, we looked at steel alloys commonly used in modern barrels. In today's post, we will continue to look at some more steel alloys used in parts of a modern firearm.Besides the 4140 and...
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Metals Used in Firearms - III
In our last couple of posts, we looked at certain types of steel alloys which are used in firearm construction. In today's post, we will look at another type of steel alloy that was invented in 1912...
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