Q&A 24: Pistols, Puppies, and Procurement

hey guys thanks for tuning in Q&A video on forgotten weapons I'm Ian McCallum and as usual I have a whole slew of questions here from those of you who are signed up to support forgotten weapons directly on patreon big thanks to all of you guys you are the reason that Forgotten weapons continues to exist continues to publish videos every single day so let's get right into these our first question is from matthias says hi having shot and gotten a close look at a stoner 63 do you think the platform or the concept the modular receiver deserves more rd regards from Sweden honestly no the more experience I get and the more guns I look at the more skeptical I get about modularity in general because while it's cool and it's a neat engineering feat like it required the amount of skill and dedication and and and knowledge that went into creating the stoner 63 system is phenomenal I think even among the people who think the stoner is incredibly cool even among those people I think there's if anything in under appreciation for how much engineering finesse went into making that gun what it is it's really kind of mind-boggling that stoner was able to do everything with that system that it does so I don't want to take away from the the skill that went into it but at the same time I don't know that there's really that much purpose for it because when you make a modular gun like that you are always going to be making you're gonna be making concessions on things you're gonna be making compromises all gun designs are compromises to begin with but a modular gun design is even more compromises because you're trying to make one part not just do its one function at the best balance of things like weight and durability now you're trying to get parts like the receiver to do two to balance in multiple functions at the same time like how do we make this an ideal rifle receiver and an ideal medium machine gun receiver at the same time and I think you will inevitably end up with guns that aren't well obviously they're not going to be as good at being each one of those different things as a dedicated gun for each purpose would be and I just don't think that the logistical benefits justify it the idea of having three guns like let's let's just say the US right now we have the the m16 or m4 pattern rifles we have the m249 as a belt-fed five five six and then we have the m240 as a belt-fed 308 trying I think if you try to combine all those three into one gun like the stoner I don't think the logistical benefits of doing that outweigh the downsides that you have namely things like the rifles gonna tend to be too heavy where the 308 machine guns going to be too light I don't think the modularity is really worth it it's a very interesting point to me and it's really kind of a fundamental philosophical question like should we be doing with the Royal we are you better off doing modular guns or doing purpose-built guns and I'm kind of swaying myself towards purpose-built next question is from Kiwi Comanche who asks why haven't you been on Instagram for so long you are missed well I apologize I started up the Instagram page hoping that I could make it work and it turns out I just do not have the time available in the day so if we could come up with a way for there to be like 30 hours in a day or perhaps like nine days in a week then I could probably get more stuff maintain a presence on more platforms like Instagram but short of that which I don't see happening anytime soon this operation pretty much just is me and I do not have the time to be posting cool stuff on Instagram as well as Facebook and patreon and YouTube and everything else so I'm sticking to the ones that honestly I'm kind of sticking to the ones I'm most familiar with so I do have a reasonably active Facebook page I do have some behind the scenes stuff that I put on patreon for the folks at the $3 level I figured that was a cool place that the people who are willing to support me to that level I think it's fun to be able to provide back with a little of extra interesting content so if I had extra time Instagram would be the next place that I would go to but I just don't actually I should mention I think they're not I think there is actually a fairly active subreddit as well our slash forgotten weapons and I do poked my head in there every few days and and occasionally comment on things when when I can and when there are things that really seem to need a comment so sorry Instagram is probably not gonna happen anytime soon next up is from Franklin who says do you believe the French were too quick to adopt the Lebel it's my understanding they had just purchased an updated crop a Czech rifle which would have served them decently if they'd taken time to perfect a new rifle design considering that within a few years we saw guns like the smle and the Gewehr 88 it seems like the French well the magazine lee-enfield he says my mistake it seems the French would have been better off designing something similar to those rifles instead of trying to get a smokeless powder design a couple of years before the other countries Franklin I believe you are exactly completely correct the French were too too rushed in developing and adopting the Lebel and to be fair to the French Ordnance Department the the Arsenal's that were doing this development they actually were not too fast at it they were going through the process of due diligence and designing the best rifle they could to really exploit this fundamental new powder they did have time to do that with the cartridge well with part of the cartridge with the bullet so they spent like a year deciding on exactly what type of bullet they wanted to use and that's where they ended up with the 8 millimeter the problem is about the time they got that figured out and by the way also jacket components things like that to withstand this you know basically close to double the velocity that people work typically used to using with with plain LED bullets anyway about the time they got that done a new minister of war was appointed in France general of Boulogne Jie and he wanted something done now and he gave the the army the Ordnance the the Armory's about six months to have a finished new rifle on his desk and it is that point that they basically took the carpaccio and said six months is just an impossible timeline to develop anything new we will take this the best thing that we have now and we will adapt it to smokeless powder they adapted it to they created the eight labelled cartridge by necking down the 11 millimeter gras cartridge that the carpet chucks used they adapted the gun to use it new barrel new chamber of some tweaks to the magazine system and boom there's the Lebel there's the new rifle prior to that they had actually been looking at both the Mon liquor system with the packet loading and block clips they would also been looking at Lee I believe the Remington Lee in particular but the new this cool new concept of the detachable box magazine and they in my opinion and yours they absolutely should have Boulanger was wrong they should have taken a couple more years because within a few years of the French introducing the Lebel everybody had smokeless powder and they would have been much better off developing a proper top-of-the-line rifle to go with their top-of-the-line cartridge if they had done that they wouldn't have needed basically they might not have needed to develop the Bertier honestly they maybe could have gotten away with having a rifle that would serve in the place of the MAS 36 all the way through the end of World War two basically like Mauser did you know the the Mauser system the bolt-action Mauser system dates to in his earliest forms the late 1880s and it served quite effectively through the end of World War two and even longer in many smaller countries so you know the perfected Mauser was 1898 ten years after the Lebel but give the Lebel a couple years and it could have been far better system oops lessons for the future they're a vyd says do you read the comments on youtube yes that's why I have a therapist no actually I don't have a therapist but maybe I should given that I read all the comments on YouTube so from the creator site as a channel owner I have a function that is a basically up to the moment stream of comments on all videos that I have published so some people occasionally comment like I'll react I'll respond to something on an old bit and someone will be like wow I didn't have any idea you'd still be reading comments on a video that's two years old well comments actually appear for me in when they're when they're written so I see comments on today's video at the same time I see comments on anything else any comments that are written today and I do read them not necessarily all of them but I try to check them once or twice a day and I found two some I tried to respond to the ones that really would benefit from a response but at the same time reading YouTube comments is kind of a well is literally a morass at best I am generally inundated there with pop culture and video game references memes you know text versions of memes because thank goodness you can't post images in YouTube comments and I have been more than once tempted to just shut them off looking at them and going you know what is this really a valid use of my time should I be spending an hour a day reading through all of this and I never quite bring myself to do it because every so often I get a youtube comment that is legitimately very valuable most often it seems they are comments from non-american military vets who have experience in the field with some of the guns that I've done videos on and it's I find it really interesting to hear from people who had first-hand experience with you know like in Argentine FN forty-nine or spanish cetme l what were these like in the field if I made some assumptions about how the guns worked or if I had some hearsay back here in the US I really like finding out was that legitimate or was I mistaken was there this some interesting thing that I wasn't otherwise aware of so those there's just enough of those comments that I'm never willing to completely shut down the feed which honestly might free up enough time for me to do Instagram every day but so yes I do read the comments no one else should read the comments you should never ever read comments on YouTube videos because they're one of the lowest forms of discourse in human social existence next up is from Garrett who said have you ever thought about to show evolution of other items besides firearms like first aid kits web gear from different eras and countries kind of sorta but not really every time it'll occasionally occurred to me if I find some particularly interesting piece of kit but then ultimately I realize that I don't really have the the contextual knowledge to know like I can very easily put up some neat piece of kit and it turns out it's the 87th iteration of this idea that's been common practice somewhere since you know the 1850s and I just didn't know about all those others because while I like to play with some of this sort of stuff some of the other military gear I do not in any way have the the depth of background knowledge on it that I do on the firearms so every once in a while you may see something like that show up it's actually more likely to show up on in range TV that's the the channel that I co-host with Karl kisara we do kind of more modern ish more practical oriented stuff and that's where material like interesting and unusual gear and ancillary equipment would show up stelios is actually kind of exactly the sort of person I was just talking about a moment ago he was in the Greek military and said he was issued at various times both an FN FAL and also a g3 and is asking about he says both guns were issued to us with standard iPods my feeling was that they improved accuracy but were tactically cumbersome do you think that bipod provide an advantage for a soldier or a hindrance and do you think the same holds true in a conscript versus a professional army I think it's a very interesting question and I am actually interested to hear I would be very interested to hear opinions on this from other people who have actual combat experience or at least military service experience because I do not my opinion is that the bipods are indeed a valuable thing in a couple of different ways so a lot of the 762 millimeter like Cold War era what a lot of people would call battle rifles had integral bipods guns like the g3 the FN FAL some iterations of the ar-10 had them the Beretta BM 59 had them and these are also guns these are guns that are in 760 NATO so full caliber full-size cartridge and were select fire the m14 there was a version of the m14 the m15 with a bipod or the m14 e2 and in that given that type of firearm the bipod kind of allows the gun to take on a pseudo light machine gun roll not certainly not an apt good substitute for a light machine gun but if you have a couple of guys if you need suppressing fire on a position and you have a couple of guys who can switch the guns from semi to full drop down on bipods those by pods make the full auto fire far more useful and controllable and practical and I think they are well suited to that role there is then also and by the way a lot of those by pods were mounted directly to barrels and so if you start putting weight on them you can very easily deflect your point of aim substantially I've seen as much as a foot difference in point of impact at say a hundred yards dependent you know from putting a lot of pressure on a bipod versus none so it's not necessary that where that's good for sustained full auto fire or suppressive full auto fire it can be a problem to try and use that for very accurate single semi-auto shots there are other a few guns not very many but there are a few guns that have free-floating built in iPods and of course predictably my example of this is going to be the French FAMAS and I think that's a really handy thing to have on the gun now my experience comes from range shooting and competition we try to make it as practical of a type of competition as possible but it ultimately is not real combat experience and so I'm certainly willing to hold open the possibility that my experience there is not representative of a true military environment to me a free flouted bipod on a rifle as long as it's not particularly heavy or bulky or clumsy is a very useful tool to have even if it you know it doesn't have to be the typical sort of you know there's a guy I want to get one precise shot so I'll flip open the bipod and go prone it can be things as simple as you know you're in urban combat in Fallujah and your job is to provide overwatch for the rest of the squad as they go down a series of buildings so they put you up on the roof and it's a lot easier in from my understanding and experience a lot easier to maintain concentration on what you're doing on observing for targets if you've got the gun sitting on a bipod at a continuous ready instead of having to hold it up yourself and maybe jiggle it around between some sort of ad-hoc support positions so I like the idea of a bipod and I think a lot of the ones that are built into current military rifles are not particularly clumsier awkward in fact the foul the g3 the FAMAS all those by pods to me are pretty clean and in handy so if you are a person with some relatively substantial experience in the area I wouldn't need to be very curious to hear your opinions on that same question next up from Nathan what are your recommendations for the best firearms museums in the US I would say - one of them is the NRA Museum in Virginia or in Maryland it's in Maryland it's just outside of DC it has a tremendous number of guns on display which is what I would want in a firearms museum they're actually well there are a quite a lot military museums out there there are relatively few firearms museums and there's a big difference especially given today is today's trend in museum designed to have fewer and fewer actual objects on display and instead to create kind of an immersive story experience about whatever event the museum is themed on as a firearms guy I really prefer if I'm looking at a military or firearms museum I would like to see as many artifacts on display as can possibly be crammed into the available space so the NRA museum certainly fulfills that and the other is the Cody firearms museum out on the opposite end of the country in Wyoming same sort of thing they also have a tremendous number of guns on display including a lot in both cases a lot of rare and unusual and unique ones and if you are ever in a position if if you're watching a video like this it is absolutely worth your time if you ever have the opportunity to visit one or both of those museums Tyler says I've been wondering about this for a long time how exactly does a gun designer know the sizes of the various working parts in the gun for example how wide or how long to make a gas piston or how far does it need to cycle back I'm also wondering about Springs how do they know what size or strength to put in the size of locking lugs or even how far the piston has to push to allow for proper cycling there are a couple different answers to that depending on what time frame you're giving it today a lot of that is done through mathematical computer-aided design systems where basically a computer-aided drafting program has a physics engine built into it and you can simulate like you can say here's my barrel chamber gas port gas piston your all the dimensions and all the weights and the materials of these and their material properties and if I simulate a fifty-five thousand psi explosion here in the chamber and the gas ports this far away what's the pressure here what how much velocity does that impart to a gas piston that is this size and weighs this much and that has in many ways dramatically simplified the work of designing this sort of thing now if you're talking about 50 or 100 years ago I think this is a lot of where design expertise comes in and certainly still today knowing approximately what you want to have those where you want to have all of those dimensions and measurements makes a big difference that's what that's what differentiates in engineering a graduate engineer from someone with experience in firearms design and 100 years ago that was that much more important a guide like browning had done so much experimentation is that just kind of new you know rule of thumb and you'll find that in every professional field like if you're gonna talk to a plumber and you know I want to design the plumbing for this house well how you know I've got I've got the main line that goes to the sewer and then I've got some lines to toilets and some lines to showers and bathtubs and sinks and some of them are right next to you know the edge of the house where the line leaves and some are on the far end of the house how to the pipes need to be how deep do they need to be to avoid freezing in the winter do they even need you know do we even care if it's a you know just a sewer line instead of an incoming pressurized water line what slope do I need to these pipes that's an area where experience and in the case of plumbing reference manuals comes into play like you do enough of it you just know oh you know we've got this much distance and this is a relatively slow draining item so we need this much slope to it same thing with firearms design and in the old days you would then and still today you you kind of you come up with an initial design and then build one and trial and error it from there often now even a long time ago they did have effective forms of high speed photography often this could take the form of something like drill a hole in a part and shine a bright light through it and so as the part moves the light moves on on your backdrops and then your backdrop is say film and you have it connected to a motor and you're spinning you know you're winding this long reel of film while you're doing the test fire of the gun and you know exactly how fast the film is moving and you say trigger this with an electrical connection that is a wire across the muzzle of the gun so when you fire a bullet the bullet breaks the wire that triggers the camera to start and then you don't get like a visible video picture of what happens but instead what you can do is then go back and look at the film and say I can trace the plot of that that bright light shining through the hole in my bolt carrier and thus I know exactly what position it was in at a given time and I can tell was it moving too fast was it moving too slow they had tools like that to help figure out the details of the engineering process so we tend to think of a lot of this stuff as well you can only do that with an electronic camera and you know that sort of circuitry didn't exist all that long ago but now they've had ways to do that clever ways that give you the diagnostic elements you need if not a nice YouTube ready video so yeah long experience trial and error and today computer-aided drafting and design next up is from Michael who says when it comes to buying ammo do you shop locally or online and if you buy online you have a favorite supplier if you have a favorite supplier do you have a promotional deal with them and if not why not well I can answer that whole train of questions I typically buy ammo online because the shops around me don't generally stock it in real bulk you know if I'm gonna if I'm I'm in a position where if I'm gonna buy ammo I'm gonna buy it I like the thousand round case because I you know I know I'm gonna use it so why buy a box or two at a time local shops generally don't carry it but just a bunch of cases of stuff they are more oriented towards selling a box or two at a time and they're more expensive it's just the truth of the matter that they are paying for a lot of employee time and lighting and you know retail property and they have expenses that an online retailer doesn't so I can get a better deal online I do have my favorite maybe I have a retailer that I have kind of gotten into using because they tend to have prices that if not quite the best are always very close to the best often they are the best and they have a really good selection of the ammo that I'm looking for which sometimes is common stuff like five five six and nine millimeter and sometimes it's weird stuff these guys are one of the most reliable sources I have four eight millimeter Lavelle now and that is SG ammo that website is SG ammo calm now I do not have any sort of promotional arrangement with them I have actually tried on a number of different occasions to set up some sort of promotional arrangement for ammo suppliers with forgotten weapons both as a video channel and just the website before I even really had a video channel and I found basically the answer why I don't is that ammo has a very limited margin and there just isn't a lot of space in the budget for an ammo dealer to make some sort of you know profit sharing sort of deal with someone like me they're just they don't have the profit margin to do it and a lot of these guys a lot of the company that I've talked to in fact I've I worked with Fiocchi for a little while those of you who've been on the website for a long time may remember seeing Fiocchi banners there I have tried to work with PPU or pervy partisan these guys those are the two companies that I am primarily dependent on for weird ammo Fiocchi makes a lot of cool obsolete pistol ammo pervy Partizan makes a lot of cool obsolete rifle ammo they're like the only people out there making eight millimeter labelled in any sort of scale and I'd love to have some sort of deal with them but Fiocchi was very difficult to deal with and just lost interest and ppyou has never been interested they just don't care and they're not looking for more advertising so SG ammo I've brought it up occasionally but they they're not really interested so okay when I when someone asks me in a context like this I will absolutely happily call out SG ammo they've always shipped fast they ship well I've never had problems with them their customer supports good not that I've ever had to return anything or really needed it but their responsiveness is good and their prices are good so that's who I use next up let's see is Pete how long do you think you will be able to keep doing forgotten weapons in its current format before running out of eligible weapons to film if your answer isn't forever do you have any kind of exit strategy for the channel hopefully a change of format rather than closure when the time comes at this point years definitely at least five years I think I have there there are enough guns out there to do they will get over time a little more difficult to source and what I I have a couple of plans in mind one of them is it's kind of something that I've been doing a little bit already and that is to branch out a bit into less forgotten weapons I think there is absolutely value in fact it's essential to in order to properly understand the guns that are popular today you have to understand the ones that aren't popular because often these are sorts of things that were in competition with each other like why do we have the a kay well part of the understanding of why we have the a Kay has to be rooted in what did it do better than the other guns that were available at the time and so for that reason of course we want to look at the weird types which I haven't had a chance to because I haven't ever been to those museums in Russia but as as it gets harder to find some of those weird prototypes I think it's worth coming back around and looking at the common guns so you'll see those periodically I did one on the mini-14 recently or one aspect of the mini-14 for part of that reason now that being said if if it gets hard enough that I just don't have enough material to continue the publishing schedule that I have what I would I think enjoy doing is reducing the the video publication rate to potentially even just one video a week but doing much more in-depth videos on them not not copying what's Ian arsenal does but getting to my mind what I would want to do is videos that touch a lot more on the practical handling and use of the firearms so to me it would be interesting to be able to have enough time to do something like let's take a couple of most ngons into a really cold environment and experiment with them for a while and see like is them for example is the Mosin better than the mauser in a really cold environment like the Eastern Front during the winter taking historic machine guns and and spending the time to properly get them tuned in you know these guns are 100 years old they virtually always require a non-trivial amount of work to get them running properly like they would have when they were brand new and that's something that I don't really have the ability to do on the publication schedule that I have now so I can show you the disassembly I can talk about the mechanics I can talk about the history but being able to actually get out there and show them to you and develop that first-hand knowledge that you can only get through reasonably extensive use of the gun is something that I can't really do right now and that I would like to so if it comes time that I can't maintain a video every day that's what I would like to sort of shift the channel into but whether that happens in one year or three years or ten years I have no idea and I'm not in a rush to do it either next question is from Chris Chris says how much of a threat were lian fields and Mosin Nagant in Afghanistan did the Soviets or Americans ever consider going back to full power rifles to counter this not that much of a threat I think there's a misunderstanding of those guns and their use in Afghanistan those guns so the the tribes that have always been fighting against foreign occupiers in Afghanistan have always have never had indigenous weapons that were anywhere near as good as what the invaders had so in our context we can take this back to the British invasions of Afghanistan when they're basically fighting against Joe sales and other muzzleloaders well when Afghans were able to capture British Enfield rifles those things were world's better than what they currently had and so those became very prized rifles and you know the guys who had them were much more effective than the guys who are still out there muzzleloading you know weird off diameter jaw sales that same thing comes back when the Russians invade now the hot gun to have is an ak74 and those guns supplanted lian fields as quickly as they were able to be captured and there's this mythology out there of the you know the like the elderly Afghan fighter with tons of combat experience who's got his Lee Enfield and he's absolutely deadly with it if floated this idea of beware the man with one gun because he probably knows how to use it really well there is some truth to that however as far as I've been able to tell there wasn't really much motivation among Afghans to keep those lian feels like if you took that guy and offered him an ak74 he would be very happy to take it and then the same thing has kind of happened again with the American invasion to the extent that ammunition is available and such but I think really the big effect was the infields got replaced by a case because the a.k was a much more suitable practical gun now did the US or the Russians we'll focus on the Russians here ever need to consider going back up to a full-power cartridge to deal with this no because had dragon house in 760 by 54 rimmed as their standard marksman's rifle at that time anyway so they already had those guns there was no no reason that they would consider really entire military with at that point it would have been like let's go dig out the SVT forties or invent something entirely new no there is no need for that let's Oh Chris has a second question which is why do we never see anyone on YouTube with a Vickers K gun that is because there are very few Vickers K guns in the United States that is basically the Vickers gun but air-cooled and with a pan or box but typically pan magazine on them the most common place you will see those is on long range desert group the LRD G SAS Jeeps in North Africa those guys often use Vickers K guns those guns were most commonly used as observers guns in like interwar aircraft just they didn't make all that many of them in the first place period and there very few of them in the US and so it's hard to find them next question is from Phoenix who says more along the lines of your cocktail connoisseurship but everyone has a drink that they abstain from or drink that doesn't agree with them for me it's tequila what is the drink or liqueur or liqueur that you don't typically touch I don't have you know typically that story is you know someone had a bad experience sorry about my phone going off there typically someone had a bad experience with something usually at a party in college and the mere sight of it makes them nauseous to this very day I don't have any experience like that I was a pretty boring person in college um and so I I don't have anything that I abstained from entirely the things that don't just really appeal to me that much are actually ear I'm not a big fan of hops and so a lot of beer just doesn't appeal to me I'm also not a huge fan of anise or black licorice flavor so things like absinthe lose oh and it's not that like I have any anything specifically against them they're just not my taste mike says i have noticed that in some of your distinctive trips like malta Denmark and Switzerland you have videos that are posted months apart how do you choose the order in which the videos are posted I don't really have any hard and fast rule what I try to do is spread them out I I may have learned from the Birdman debacle years ago that inundating you guys with too much identical content all at the same time isn't the best course of action so and often a trip that I take like that will have a lot of content of a similar theme because whatever I have access to in a particular foreign country I'll try and cover like whatever special there that I can't get back in the US that's something I try to focus on covering South Africa is a perfect example in fact almost my entire trip to South Africa consists of filming South African and Rhodesian guns and I don't want to just dump you know a month of nothing but South African guns so what I try and do is balance them out if anything I will kind of default to having one video per week from any given trip so there will be times when you'll find when I'm plotting out a month of scheduling I'll be like okay you know Monday will be South Africa Wednesday will be Malta and Friday will be a video from Europe sorry again about my phone and then I try and balance the the type of guns so we've got some things that are you know really obscure collector niche items and we've got some things that are more well known popular items like a lot of the stuff I filmed at HK falls into the well-known popular theme and I try to balance those out as well I don't want to inundate the channel with all popular you know video game connected guns and I also don't want to overwhelm it with things that most people aren't going to be interested in so variety in all things would be my general guiding principle Parker asks has there been any weapon you would thought would be really cool but once you've got your hands on it was actually not interesting or unique and didn't turn into a video not well so in some ways yes all the time like when I go to visit one of the auction houses what I have going in is generally a an Excel spreadsheet of what guns are going to be in that auction but that has fairly limited information you know fairly limited details and has no pictures so it's not uncommon at all for me to say ah you know here's this interesting Mauser variant for example I'll plan on doing a video on that one and when I get there I discover it's been sport Erised perhaps or it isn't quite the variant that I thought or it's just not a good example maybe it's in really rough condition too rough for me to want to actually put that one on camera and so then I'll scrap that and not do a video on it planning to later eventually when I do find a good example of that gun I'll do a video then on I think more to the point of what you were getting at Parker the best example I can think of of a gun whose reality was completely different than my expectation would be the johnson light machine gun I had a chance to shoot one of those and I was expecting this to be like a really cool really good light machine gun you know it's it's light enough to be nice and portable it's a it's lighter than the BA R it's got a good magazine you know good capacity magazine it's got a bipod on it it's got a good pistol grip this ought to be a great gun on paper looks like a great gun turns out it's miserable to shoot that thing recoils way more than you would anticipate and it's interesting that I have found the same thing when I had a chance to shoot a semi-auto drawer full auto semi and the drawer is just a variation basically an iteration on the Johnson that thing even in semi-auto was a beast to shoot that left me with red marks on my shoulder matching the shape of the butt plate and then I've made a habit ever since of whenever I run into someone who has a Johnson like machine gun I ask them about it and the response has universally been yeah those things are really unpleasant to shoot so I still plan to do a video on one that one time I had a chance to shoot one wasn't something I had an opportunity to be filming but that is a gun that I did not anticipate the reality of that gun Eric says what guns if any are on your must-have list to complete your collection of French weapons it's getting kind of down to some of the pretty unique and weird and like really hard to find stuff so first one that comes to mind is an fr F to the almost current I think they're in the process of replacing it right now bolt-action sniper rifle that's going to be an extremely difficult weapon yet who knows all things maybe are possible I have one good example of the French carpet checks there are four different variations of them the 1878 the 1884 the 1885 and the 1874 / 85 and I have a really nice 18 1878 in fact it will be in my book I have a pretty mediocre 1884 and I would really like to get good examples of those latter three French carpet checks they're extremely rare here in the US eventually those are possible but it'll take some time to find them beyond that some really really niche variations like I'd love to have a remington made o 715 murphy a that was actually actually taken into service by the french military those are very very scarce and a few other things like that but it's getting pretty close to having like a complete collection of french rifles which is really cool ben says as someone who shoots far more than most of us get the chance to which may actually not be the case have you ever kept been concerned about LED exposure do you take any precautions or follow any post range routines and have you ever had your lead levels checked by a doctor that is a very good question so first off i do i do more shooting than the average person but i'd probably don't do quite as much shooting as a lot of people think because frankly i'm spending most of my time traveling and filming videos you'll notice most of my videos that don't have shooting i wish i was able to do more shooting than I currently do now as for avoiding lead contamination in the first place what shooting I do is almost exclusively at outdoor ranges and that goes a very long way to mitigating risk the biggest place that you have lead exposure is in an indoor range where you have bullets impacting a backstop and then having aerated lid basically getting into the air supply and inhaling it and that's obviously a big problem and that's a major maintenance issue for indoor ranges well I don't like into arranges for a lot of reasons the noise the congestion the exposure to lead being a smaller but still one of those factors so by shooting outside I avoid a lot of the issue I habitually I will always wash my hands between shooting and eating anything that goes a long way I don't do any of my own hand loading if you hand load especially hand loading unjacketed soft lead bullets you're gonna be at a much greater risk for lead exposure that way I did have my lead levels checked but it was a while ago it wasn't an issue at the time and I haven't changed any major practices since then so I haven't had them checked in a while if you shoot a lot at an indoor range if you shoot a lot with unjacketed leads that is definitely something that you ought to think about not saying you need to do anything specific to prevent it but definitely think about that because lead led is a bad thing to get in your blood as Flint Michigan has taught us let's see next up Brett why nine by nineteen millimeter what led to the nine-millimeter becoming such a universal round even prior to World War two it seems odd that a cartridge used by the bad guys stayed popular after World War one that cartridge was used by a lot of people and the 9-millimeter nine by nineteen Parabellum was one of the best cartridge pre you know the best early semi-automatic pistol pre-world War one cartridges it was one of the most powerful it was one of the most efficient if you compare it something like nine by twenty three it gets more energy in a shorter case the design worked well it's a rimless case a lot of those early cartridges were semi rimmed things like the 9 millimeter Browning semi rimmed that turned out to not be a great design concept and didn't stick around very long it has just enough taper to be reliable but not so much taper that it causes problems in magazines it's just a really well put together cartridge and it was available in some of the best pistols well the the best pistol available before World War one which would be the Luger obviously 1911 is a popular gun but it was not nearly as prolific on the International on the world market as the Luger was Luger was begun to have prior you know 1900 to 1910 and so it's not really surprising to me that it stuck around it was also a cartridge that that integrated well into submachine guns which helped to keep it popular the 45 ACP for example you start losing magazine capacity which wasn't that big a deal for early pistols but it was for early submachine guns it's just a really efficient good cartridge and that's why it stuck around so long despite being used by the quote/unquote bad guys moose Mimar says in honor of the g11 video do you think there could ever be a resurgence of interest in caseless ammunition for an aircraft gun cooling would be less of an issue given high altitude and air speed and some other things and the answer is no because there will never be a resurgence of interest in guns on aircraft maybe on helicopters in in the form of tannins but on actual like combat aircraft fighter aircraft jets no because the opponents are moving far too fast and are far too far away for guns to be a good option missiles are are the technology going forward and they will not be replaced by guns so would something like the a-10 benefit from a caseless shell maybe if anyone is ever able to properly develop caseless ammunition for small arms then maybe the I'm sure there will be some interest in it in larger calibers I'm dubious that it would ever actually make any significant impact an aviation related setting halfway through here next question is from Andrew who is also asking this question again if the mini-14 had been made ten years earlier do you think that its similarity in aesthetics and function to the m14 would have given it an advantage over the m16 or AR if they were competing against each other for military adoption during the Vietnam era I am sad to say that it probably would have it certainly would have would have been a point to the mini for team's benefit would it have been enough to actually edge it out over the Armalite I hope not I think history has shown us pretty conclusively that the air the AR the m16 is the better design system I would certainly prefer it over the mini-14 but given what we do know about some of the people involved in the u.s. procurement process very possible that that you know familiarity and it's a there probably would have been something to the effect of like we can make some of the parts on the tooling from the m14 despite the fact that that never works out yeah probably would have helped it yeah not for the not to the benefit of the American military though Keith says if you had the money to build a collection of NFA firearms but had to limit yourself to one theme or category what would it be that is a pretty easy one for me it would be light machine guns especially if I had to get more specific than that it would be early light machine guns but to me for NFA stuff which for those of you who aren't in the u.s. that basically is short rail rifles and shotguns silencers and machine guns the most interesting of those are of course the machine guns and the most interesting machine guns to me are rifle caliber but easily portable so I owned a Vickers gun for a while and I ended up selling it when I realized I just I never take it out to the range it is too much of a hassle too much work too much infrastructure - to really be worth using all that much mechanically there are amazing guns there engineering marvels but it's a lot of money to have invested in something that sits on the floor and you take out to shoot like once every two years so light machine guns have the benefit of just like pick the thing up and put it in a car so magazine-fed light machine guns would be my my ideal like that's the niche that i would be really interested in collecting maybe someday that'll happen that'd be cool but Keith's points out that his would actually be basically that or world war one heavy machine guns and I can see World War one heavy machine guns being an awesome collecting focus it's gonna take a lot more space not necessarily more money than light machine guns but more space and man though so many of those are just really cool Maxim's and choise Llosa's and Vickers gun and the early Colt guns that that would be really cool too but not quite my taste santé Roga says what semi-automatic rifle either last-ditch or regular production or modern improvised do you think would be best suited to an effort by home builders to recreate moderate tooling lathes small mill and purchasing premade barrel stock well I would say the easiest way to approach that question would be to start by looking at what things cannot be done with basic tools in a home shop and the things that really jump out to me there are of course stampings you can make stampings you can mill your own stamping dies and presses are not that hard to get a press is a pretty basic machine tool along with a lathe or a mill but typically if you're trying to recreate a gun the guns that have stamped parts are made for mass production and it's going to be easier for you to mill apart than to mill a die to make a part with another tool so I would eliminate everything that has stamped parts I would then eliminate recoil-operated guns I think those are generally going to be a little more difficult Sara Lee but probably the this is again again if people are gonna assume this is my Franck Ophelia coming through here but one of the guns that occurs to me that might be a particularly good option here would be the Maus 49 or 49 56 it has a milled receiver it's not exactly the world's simplest milled receiver but it's not particularly complex it has a very simple operating mechanism it is true direct gas impingement which means you don't have to build a gas system or a gas piston you will have to drill a gas port that can be done that's not that difficult it's got a limited number of moving parts which is what you want if you're trying to make a gun in a home shop so I would say stick to gas operated guns and I think the the direct gas impingement is a really good option there short-stroke gas piston or even long stroke gas piston would certainly work as well yeah you know at you could do an SKS I have an SKS hand made by a little shop in Vietnam I'll do a video on that at some point here but can't be done Craig speaking of the SKS says the SKS rifle is such an amazing shooting rifle and an underappreciated in the military surplus market could you see it further optimized with aftermarket accessories and becoming quite the pricy collectible in another decade yes absolutely I agree that fundamentally if they're the reason the SKS is underappreciated is because there are so many of them here because we got massive amounts of surplus SKS's both commercially from China actually and then surplus from a lot of Warsaw Pact countries after the fall of the Soviet Union and when the guns are available for 89 or 99 bucks or even less people don't tend to get pay them much respect and if you do want one well you know there's just that like it's that Romanian junk or that Chinese junk or that Yugoslavs ankh and can always get one later you know they're not it how can they possibly be interesting if they're that readily available and that cheap and once those guns dry up they absolutely will become valuable and people will start to recognize that hey you know this is actually a totally legitimate widespread military cold war like a true military firearm because those SKS's were never full auto the SKS is we have in this country are generally speaking completely original military manufacture unless their commercial production guns but you compare that to most of the other guns of the Cold War fowls g3s ak's all of those things generally speaking the best you can get as an individual collector without getting into the machine gun market or a tremendous amount of money the best you can get our parts kits with american-made receivers and SKS isn't that an SKS is it that you have is exactly what came out of that factory and what was issued to that military and that's something that a lot of people I think don't recognize or don't really care about when the guns are cheap look at how people treat like an actual FN production foul or an actual HK production g3 instead of one with a century receiver or a PTR receiver or you know any of the various a.k receivers made in the US it will take a while for them to go up in value and of course the rarest ones will go up first so you can see a little bit of that Albanian SKS's are worth a premium East German North Korean and North Vietnamese SKS's are worth a substantial premium because those never came in in any sort of quantity never mass commercially imported but yeah over time those will go up now as for the SKS being like improved and modernized no not really Carl and I still have plans to do that over on in range that's part of a cool project that we're both really interested in but just haven't had the opportunity to to follow up on yet but I promise that sooner or later we will and we'll take a look at what can you do with nasca us to make it into a more modernized firearm today with the aftermarket parts that are still around pear / ter had a number of questions of which I'm going to pick one here to answer with all of the idiotic wonder weapons Hitler commissioned or had designed has there ever been a small-arms equivalent of some supposedly tide turning concept that turned out to be completely worthless or just plain doomed from the start like the mouse the heavy Gustav or the v2 rocket the Petterson device never saw service and that's the only one I can think of this is people aren't gonna maybe like this but I would say the FG 42 fits that pretty well the amount of the the resources that were put into developing and producing the FG 42 are completely out of relation to the impact it had on the war which i think is the core of what you're getting at in the question here you know where did they spend time and money and effort that could have been far better utilized on a more practical thing well the gun they came up with the FG 42 is awesome and kind of in the same way that the v2 was a major stepping stone for post-war rocket development and ultimately space exploration but that doesn't mean it was the right thing that they should have been doing during the war by the time the FG 42 was put into production the 8 millimeter Curt's cartridge was a known thing and the idea of having this really specialized rifle for paratroops that was only going to be used in some pretty limited circumstances doesn't make logistical sense like the paratroops should have stuck with mg 34 or 42 s in drop canisters and strim givers as their personal weapons that would have made a lot more sense you would have been able to you know take all the money that went into the FG 42 design process and put it to better use somewhere else the downside to that is we wouldn't have gotten the FG 42 which is a truly awesome and really cool gun but as I think I've said occasionally before and is becoming more and more apparent to me there is often the the practicality of a gun and the coolness of a gun are often inversely proportional like the cooler it is the less likely that it's going to be a really good practical gun the afteryou 42 runs really well but mmm not not the wisest thing for them to have been spending money on Gregg says I know you've been asked and have answered about the lage M 11/15 which is an adapter it well it's a replacement upper for the the mac-10 Mac 11 M 11 nine submachine guns to turn them into open bolt locked breech five five six guns and it's super awesome and I'm on the waiting list in fact I discovered I am actually number one on the waiting list for the version of that that will fit my Mac I'm really excited about it but Gregg's question is have you heard of the tenko upper 10 Co upper for the Mac series recently announced on Izzy talk and what are your thoughts on it I have heard bits and pieces about it after getting this question I went and did a little more poking it is interesting it is only being developed at this point for the m10 which is the 45 caliber Mac which makes it less interesting to me because I don't have one of those I am also like if I right now had to put a bet on like you can only you can only pursue one of these developments which one do you want it to be it would have to be the lage because Richard lage has a tremendous track record of making products that are good and work and his customer support is excellent and these other guys this is their first thing now I don't know what experience the the designers the the people involved have personally before but the company exists only to do this conversion of the mac-10 so I'm putting my money literally and figuratively on lage because he's got the track record to justify it for me now if Tenko comes out with a cool one for the m10 great in fact what I see online is that they're working on 760 by 39 and apparently it looks like they're also working on an adapter that would allow you to fit an unmodified AR upper to an unmodified mac-10 lower it looks kind of ugly and clucky like there's a lot of length of pole in this thing because everything's spaced out way more than all the parts were originally designed for that's pretty cool we'll have to wait and see there being a little more tight-lipped about it than legions I suspect they're not quite so far along in the development process they've got some prototypes you can see video of them on YouTube shooting it's te n ko so I got nothing against him I would love to get a chance to tinker with one once they're finished and ready but it's not gonna apply to me directly because the Mac that I have is an M 11 a1 and I got that specifically to get one of the lage uppers and by the way as soon as those are out which hopefully will be something like summer of 2019 I'll be very excited to do some video and some shooting I'm really looking forward to that Anthony says what historical firearm do you think is the most overrated today due to its representation or inclusion in pop culture video games movies TV shows etc my initial answer is the Walther wa2000 that was a an adequate gun in the 70s 70s and maybe 80s it was accurate it was okay it was far too expensive it was mechanically fairly complex it was a complex to make and because of its scarcity and its inclusion in pop culture stuff it's become a completely mythologized gun and in practice it's okay but like get a lot of things today that shoot every bit as well if not better than a Walther mm and do it for a tiny fraction of the price in general you tend to get guns that are both have reputations that are both too good and too poor as a result of pop culture inclusions because ultimately pop culture does not reflect the realities of any firearm and I'm sure this applies to everything else vehicles any other sort of prop element that goes into TV or video game or movies like they're there to do whatever the script says video games in particular they bear no relation to a real gun I hope people realize that like maybe the animation is the same as how a real gun looks but ultimately it not a gun it's just a collection of electronic bits that do numbers and that's not the same thing so they're the list basically every gun is incorrectly portrayed in pop culture because the point of pop culture is not to accurately portray the gun Wesley says is trigger discipline of recent development where troops taught to have trigger discipline with finger straight off the trigger until ready to fire in world wars and before no trigger discipline is absolutely a relatively recent phenomenon you can see that by looking at pictures of soldiers all over the place and not just soldiers but just regular civilian shooters it is freakishly common to find guys with and girls with fingers wrapped around the trigger muzzle discipline not quite as bad but also not good that really is a fairly recent development and I think it's an aspect of that it's something that people don't necessarily get we don't give ourselves due credit for firearm safety in terms of actually you know I accident I accidentally shot that thing firearm safety in that way has made tremendous improvements there are a tiny number of actual legitimately accidental shootings today and that has been a very deliberate effort by a lot of gun safety groups I won't mention names because some of them are very politically touchy but you know what there's a lot of a lot of people will fixate on the political motivation of a group that's involved in firearms and overlooked the fact that they may also do a lot of work in gun safety and that gun safety work has had fantastic very positive outcomes hunter safety you know accidental shootings all that sort of stuff is down a lot and it's really cool and you can see this in large part by looking at photographs of the past when people are wandering around with fingers on triggers and waving guns around in what we would today considered nauseatingly unsafe ways in fact before I move on the one other interesting application of this that I've seen is relating to re-enactor you get dyes today especially guys who have real shooting backgrounds who get into re-enacting and they'll tend to hold rifles in this you know low ready you have the the butt in your shoulder and holding the gun pointed at the ground in a safe direction and that's not historically accurate if you want to recreate the way soldiers actually walked around with guns say in World War two it was often horizontal finger over the trigger and holding the gun across you know across the waist walking around with it like this and again what today we would consider it be tremendously unsafe because half the time they're pointing it at the guys next to them that's just how it was done that's what people did back then one more page here see if we can finish these all before my voice gives out Chris says I wondered what is your background in firearms to have such an impressive knowledge of them first off thank you brings up an interesting point what is a background in firearms because there is no like you can't go to college and get a degree in in like gun history or firearms mechanics you could go to a gunsmithing school for sure but not really quite the same thing so my background is quite literally I've spent about ten years professionally doing it that's about how long I've been running and forgotten weapons it started as just a website and then evolved into a video channel and by having that as at first a hobby a passion of mine and then turning into a full-time job that gives me the opportunity to spend a lot of time hands-on with a lot of guns gives me a lot of opportunity to do research you know there's a tremendous amount of knowledge in a library like this and and that's a huge boon to me to be able to access the work of other researchers so if you were to go to someone and say what is your background in this thing that you have done professionally for 10 years the answer is usually I got a college degree which kind of didn't have anything to do with what I actually do today and then I have 10 years of experience doing it that is that is my background is I've been very consciously doing it this long with an eye towards being as accurate and as correct as I can be Dina says congratulations on being a step closer to publishing your book thank you it is by the way being peer-reviewed right now so the main use the initial draft of the manuscript is done which is very exciting since you now have the French firearms book coming soon and the a keg I'd already published that would be the Vickers guide Volume one on the Kalashnikov which actually has my name on the cover which is super cool I was wondering what advice would you give to an aspiring firearms author such as myself it will take longer than you expect you do not know as much as you think you do when you go into the process of writing that's that's probably the biggest single thing that I discovered writing a book on French military rifles is you can have a subject and think wow you know I know all about this stuff I'm pretty hot stuff like I'm an expert and then when you try to write it down that's when you discover every little hole in your knowledge because you'll be writing down like here's the story of gun X and you get to a point you're like oh wait when they made this variation why did they do that I never really thought about that why did they do that I have to go find that out and then you keep moving down and then you'll be like well you know in 1910 they had this in 1920 they had this and it's different like what changed and why and when and oh I don't know I have to go find out so the at the end of writing a book you are a far better you know far more on the subject than you did when you started which for me and hopefully for you as well was one of the really cool parts of doing that writing like I find this topic genuinely fascinating and that's why I was writing the book in the first place is because I liked the subject matter and to discover that I will come out of the process knowing even more about it like a lot more about it than I did going in that's really cool that's like a side benefit for a lot of people I think if you understand that effect I think a lot of people would be willing to write a book for no money like not expecting to ever sell a copy but to write a book simply to learn as much as you know you will learn in that process Duncan asks what is your opinion on the viability of sidearms in modern combat and the US Army's replacement of their m9 with the p3 20 I don't think it matters I think handguns are basically never used in a combat situation not on any sort of reasonable scale yeah I know someone's gonna point out this incident in that event where they were you know saved an entire division with a pistol but in the grand scheme of things you have to have pistols for a number of reasons but it is very rare that they are actually used and so as long as one's military does not adopt a gun that is a complete deathtrap it really doesn't matter that's why what you see in the the procurement trials it's not really about like what's the best competition gun you know they're not adopting some Itzik refine red dot equipped Luber blaster they're adopting gun largely on logistics like how much does the gun cost how much does the ammo cost what about holsters and training and how long do the parks last because you know we know we're gonna have to replace a bunch of these parts so we have to factor that into our decision and ultimately do they want a gun that's gonna be good enough and cost as little as possible because that's that's really what you need out of a handgun in a military context Josie says did John Moses Browning have any notable firearms ideas or mechanical concepts which didn't pan out or were outright failures we're familiar with a seemingly endless list of his successes with handguns rifles shotguns and machine guns so it seems like he hit a home run every time is this true or were there some bumps in the road yes there were actually a lot of bumps in the road for him part of the reason that he looks so successful is first off he was extremely successful and perhaps the most successful most brilliant firearms designer we've ever had on this planet because of that success Winchester really wanted everything that came out of his brain and so they made a deal that they until a certain point when it fell apart they bought every patent he came up with and then it was up to Winchester to determine what they could do with that patent so yes a lot of them were turned into very successful firearms but a lot of them also went nowhere like will buy this patent this one this looks like crap or you know it's some widget that we can never make commercially successful but we want to make sure that the next patent he comes up with we get first track up because it might be the next Auto five or the next you know the next lever action the next winchester 1895 or any one of his other fantastically successful guns so we'll buy everything if it's not good fine we just write off that cost and we're willing to accept it and we'll sit on that patent because it's worthless a good example of that would be if you're familiar with the colt a tad bigger machine gun he designed that has this gas lever that swings well he patented a pistol working the same way that had this little gas lever on top of the slide well it didn't have a slide because I had this gas lever that is a not successful gun I don't think they ever even made a prototype of it but that pert that patent got purchased up because they wanted to make sure that they continue to get win chair get Browning's other ideas so yeah he invented a lot of stuff that didn't go anywhere I know means was he a hundred percent successful Travis ten says in it seems that countries like Germany and Japan resorted to last-ditch weapons that function essentially the same and just as effectively as the well finished iterations early in the work very perceptive knowing that they were outnumbered and needed to equip as many troops in as little time and material as they could from the beginning why would they not have started out with not caring about the finish or the details as much and focus only on making the weapons function well largely because a lot of these guns are actually made and adopted and procured in peacetime and it just kind of goes against human nature to deliberately adopt a crummy looking cheap done you know look at it today there's a lot of simplification that we could do on US military rifles if you take an m16 and go okay let's say there's been five years of strategic bombing and we need to make a million of these as cheaply as possible what could we simplify like let's take the collapsing stock on an m4 and just get not collapse like they can just deal with it and we could look back on that historically and say you know the collapsing stock wasn't that big a deal certainly didn't justify the extra cost so let's leave it off simplify the handguards simplify the rear sights give them fixed sights but the the procurement realities of peacetime prevent that from ever happening because there'd be an outrage like why are you equipping our troops with these deliberately you know subpar guns they look like crap you know they don't even have an upper handguard to protect your hand regardless of whether that's actually all that important or not so it's one of those things where it just doesn't really sink in until it's too late and also you have an issue of this is industrial production and to a certain extent it's cheaper like your production stays higher by continuing to do what you already have in process just changing the process is going to put the production line out of commission for some period of time and let's say you're making a hundred thousand rifles a month do you really can you afford to have zero rifles for a month while you're retooling the whole thing to make a simpler one even if you know you'll get 150,000 a month after that well what month do you choose to have zero you know if if you're in the middle of a war there's never a good month you're not you can't see into the future and be like ah well we know that three months from now we'll have a lull in you know in this offensive drive and we can put off rifle production then you never know it's always going to look kind of like this is the most important time and we need the most production right now so these changes have to be phased in and they don't happen as quickly as as you might expect Kurosawa says rail guns versus coil guns in a futuristic as a futuristic rifle I'm writing a TV pilot in which future militaries use such weapons a standard issue I was wondering what the pros and cons of each concept might be honestly I have no idea it's not something I've spent any time really thinking about until such time as we have the energy storage to make either of those concepts even remotely feasible it's just sci-fi so interesting in concept but not something that I've really looked into richard says in your research have you found any instances of soldiers bringing their own personal pistols into combat particularly World War one I know pistols were mostly signs of rank but I would imagine that if a soldier could fit a small pocket 32 or revolver in their uniform they would have brought theirs along for backup or close quarters at least I know I would have yes actually not that uncommon especially among cultures like the US where firearms ownership was pretty common on the one hand for example in World War one British officers were simply required and expected to provide their own handguns so every officers pistol in World War one in the British military was a personal pistol and you could buy whatever model you wanted with the caveat that they had to use the standard service ammunition the army would issue um Oh for your personal gun so whether it was a Webley Mark 6 or a Webley WG or any note you know a Webley Fosbury whatever you wanted to get if it was 455 Webley that's that's cool you're an officer you're supposed to be a big boy and you're supposed to have access to that sort of thing and you'll provide it yourself as far as like the the infantry the you know the privates on the line yeah I've read a number of accounts of American soldiers World War one and also World War two who would do things like you know write home and ask op to send them a revolver or maybe just have it sent without specifically being asked for you know hey we here's a we got this 38 we figured you might want something for your foxhole in case you know a Japanese soldier on a Banzai charge jumps into your foxhole or in case you know the Germans overrun the line you're not issued a pistol so here we have mailed you your 38 or whatever else might be at hand now that's tempered by the fact that handguns were pretty expensive more expensive in context back then than they are today relative to people's income especially a lot of the people who were conscripted or volunteer privates in the infantry but yeah it absolutely happened you probably you know if you were someone who would normally be issued a pistol that's less likely to happen if your taint crewman or an aircraft crewman but if you didn't have a pistol issued not that uncommon to provide one for yourself you will see the same thing with the German officers in World War one there was a lot of use of a wide variety of pistols which makes it kind of interesting and difficult to study German handguns during World War one because there was such a variety so yeah definitely happened let's see Adam there was a lot of info out there about the Lebel being the first smokeless powder military rifle but what was the first smokeless powder pistol what kind of impact did it have on the evolution of pistol making and use actually I have a video the first smokeless powder pistol basically I think it's just simpler to say what was the first semi-auto pistol because the major impact of smokeless powder on handguns was making semi-auto handguns a feasible thing black there were black powder obviously black powder revolvers that's not that big of a problem because you don't really have a mechanism that you have to that's going to get fouled up with black powder that quickly and stopped working there were some manually operated repeating pistols like the volcanic and a bunch of weird cool Austrian designs with black powder but it wasn't until we had smokeless powder that semi auto pistols really became available and the first one of those was the Salvatore dormice and I have an entire video actually I have a video on the Salvatore dormice and I have a whole video on specifically what were the very first semi auto pistols next up is a will I love that you include your dog in videos you've actually pushed me over the edge until letting my daughters get a red healer last year and it has been wonderful can you please share some details about your dog and their story her story Dharma very cool I got a red healer there red and blue healers they're also known as Australian Cattle Dogs they have a tremendous amount of energy and they're actually remarkably long-lived dogs for what that's worth the reason that we have one is because a co-worker of my wife's six years ago now seven years ago had a pair of red healer puppies show up on his front door like you opened the door to go to work one day and there was this pair of puppies that had been abandoned by someone pray not abandoned on his front door but you know room free little puppies which is something that only unfavorable people do because what that means is they're going to die of starvation or out here in the desert they're gonna die of thirst well these two found their way to this co-workers front door and he put out water and food for them hoping they'd go away yeah you know how likely that is so he got back that evening and there very happily right there still so he started looking around at at their place of employment for someone who might be interested and my wife expressed a potential interest like well we'll look and one of them had already been adopted to that point so Dharma the other puppy was brought in into our living room and this little tiny fuzzball of the puppy and walked the perimeter of the living room kind of sniffing things and then came right back to my wife looked up her right in the eyes and then curled up on her foot and went to sleep and so now we have a dog wha-hoo says did any fg42 type ones make it back into the US as transferable functional guns yes not a lot probably less than a dozen but there are some on the registry so they are out there save your pennies Jessie says between forgotten weapons and see an arsenal I have found some of the most interesting content to be concerning handguns that have unique designed actions especially with regard to early semi-auto pistols I agree completely do you have any recommendations for good books that delve into the history and design concepts and functions of pistols from this era yes I do and I like taking every opportunity I get to plug this book because it is a great book handguns of the world by Edward Iselle mr. Iselle is a very noted firearms expert and author unfortunately deceased now but he wrote this rather huge book I have a whole specific book review on this this is 700 pages long it is index and it is comprehensive they call it a comprehensive international guide to military revolvers and self loaders and that's exactly what it is going up to about World War two and it covers both the commonplace guns that did get adopted and all sorts of weird stuff all the sorts of guns that you see on forgotten weapons are covered in here it's an awesome book it is not quite as cheap as it used to be when I first started talking about that you could get a copy on Amazon for like five bucks plus five bucks shipping it's more expensive than that now but this was published by Barnes & Noble this was not some little niche you know boutique Press book this was intended to be you know mass-market and widely available and so they're still out there and readily available and I strongly recommend that book if you can only have one book on pistols that is absolutely the one that I would I would suggest to you a different Jesse I believe is asking this question a second time so I try to answer stuff when he gets asked repeatedly if I don't do it the first or second time I let tell me keep submitting it I try to get to them charger clips vers Mauser clips and why did any country use mousers with charger clips charger clips meaning like k31 and Vetter leave Vitaly style clips that is a clip that doesn't just hold the rim of the cartridge like I'm a traditional Mauser stripper clip but actually kind of encapsulates the whole thing and supports the case head and the bullet the two notable one is to do this are the Swedish or the Swiss k31 s and Schmidt Rubens and the vet early Vitaly no no not really nobody else really used those there were a few experiments with semi-auto rifles like the FAL to use sort of the same style of clip they wanted to do a 10-round clip and in order to make in order to support that like to keep the rounds in lines so that you could easily load them it was kind of a horseshoe-shaped thing that supported the front as well but in general what people found is you didn't need the extra support on a five-round clip a regular stripper clip worked just fine they were a lot less bulky they were cheaper they were easier there's no need to have this full-on charger clip interesting that the Swiss actually made those basically disposable because they're chargers were made out of like compressed cardboard and our last question for today the end of three pages is from Stephen says I was thinking for precision or long-range shooting would it make more sense to have a trigger that would fire the rifle on release instead of pol this is something that was actually done for a while with shotguns sporting shotguns release triggers where when you're ready to fire you pull the trigger and nothing happens and when you release it that's when the gun fires there are a couple of basic safety problems with those which is why they're not really seen in shotgun use anymore namely once you pull that trigger like some is done a fire somewhere if you have a regular trigger and you know you've got your finger on the trigger and you're on target and you decide not to fire just take your finger off the trigger and nothing happens with a release trigger you tend to pull the trigger and then you're tracking your target waiting for just the right moment to release it because you have to pull it first and then what happens if you decide you don't want to take the shot now you're stuck here with this thing that's gonna go off it's like a Deadman switch now in your hand and there may be ways to mitigate that like engage the safety and then release the trigger but ultimately when it's so what the only time this would really be an advantage is when you have to have a very very crisp very light trigger or when you get the most benefit from that you know we can do that with a regular press trigger and I think physiologically yeah it sounds like it makes sense in the context of something like an account revolver with this really long heavy trigger pull well what if you could pull that whole thing through and then when you release it then it fires but you don't have to have a long and heavy trigger pull especially for a competition or a target or a sniper's rifle you just have a very crisp light trigger and it works just as well without having the additional the safety issues sitting out there waiting to eventually cause a problem for someone so that is all the questions that we have time for today thank you to everyone who submitted a question I got I think about 300 questions for this Q&A which is about 12 times as many as I can actually have time and voice my voice is starting to go here far more than I have time to answer so if you think you had a darn good question and I didn't answer at this time please do submit it next month and I will do my best to to address it there were several in here that were repeat questions if you want to get in on this and you haven't been able to in the past this is for folks who are on patreon at the $2 a month and up level and I will say thank you to all of you and now I need to go answer my phone because I forgot to turn it off before I started recording thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 615,394

Rating: 4.8546748 out of 5

Keywords: john browning, mccollum, forgotten weapons, q&a, question, answer, question and answer, museum, cody, cody firearms museum, lebel, kropatschek, afghanistan, enfield, smle, vickers k, stoner 63, frf2, mini14, 9mm, 9x19, luger, sks, collectible, collect, lage, max11/15, wa2000, dog, red heeler, australian cattle dog

Id: 5uqD9oAX28o

Length: 84min 57sec (5097 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/DeathtoMainers]

He mentioned us!

[u/Slampumpthejam]

I loved Bergmann week :(

[u/MohlCat]

Forgotten Puppies

[u/Polder]

Particularly good questions this month. Not many people are capable of making an hour and a half long video that you will sit down and watch straight through.

I'm going outside now.

[u/JohnBrown1ng]

Hi Ian! 👋

[u/NarcissisticCat]

Sempai noticed us!