With the new movie, The Revenant, about to open, we found on the Contemporary Makers blog a fascinating story by Ron Luckenbill about the two identical rifles he built for the movie — in less than 60 days for both. Ron is justly proud of the work he’s done here. This is the gun that I built for …
Iron sights are obsolete. Britain saw this one, and acted on it, before the United States did. (So did Germany, even earlier; but then they backed off). The plain truth is that iron sights are obsolete, outdated, dead; they’re not just resting or pining for the fjords. They’ve shuffled off their mortal coil and joined the Choir Invisible. They’re …
Thing is, it works: M4 Carbine with accessories as used by Big Green about 10 years back (the accessories are also under continuous improvement). Click to, etc. One gets weary of seeing forum commandos and gunshop experts spouting nonsense about current issue weapons. Most usually, this is in the form of bad-mouthing the M4A1, a …
This is a subject of great interest to all of us who carry in self-defense, because what Dunn done wrong came around and done Dunn wrong in the end. He’s almost certainly going to die in prison, and he didn’t have to. Somewhere along the way some bad ideas took root in his head; perhaps he got …
Around 1970, Heckler & Koch was doing well, but their restless engineers were thinking: what’s next? One thing we learn from history is that no weapons system lasts forever, and there was maybe one more go-around in the company’s present line of roller-locked weapons, trading some militaries’ 7.62 NATO weapons for 5.56 NATO ones. But what could offer …
It turns out, what happened in September, 2013, is not what we’ve been told. The official line goes something like this: that up to a dozen armed jihadis attacked, killed hundreds, holed up with dozens of hostages and blew the place up, and were taken out in a determined assault by Nairobi SWAT. “Fucking Americans!” …
So far in this series, we’ve looked at the development of US and Western European anti-tank guided missiles, from their origins in a German WWII design program to their introduction to combat — just in time to encounter Russian missiles designed along similar lines — in the Vietnam War. (The Russian missiles got the first kill, by …
The Sokolovsky Automaster was promoted, shortly before its entry into production, as the “Rolls Royce of .45 Auto Pistols.” The pistol was starkly beautiful in an angular, Modernist way. Indeed, the design might be called Brutalist, although we don’t think the Brutalists ever escaped from architecture into industrial design, did they? And frankly, the Sokolovsky …
If the old saw that “there’s no bad publicity” is actually true, Stephen Troy’s tight little network of companies should be riding high. They make firearms and accessories, make parts for some of the biggest-name AR manufacturers, and provide relevant support services, such as training. But the company took a hit from a presumed partner …
We’ve been reading Tiger Tracks: The Classic Panzer Memoir by Wolfgang Faust. Republished by Sprech Media, which publishes and republishes English translations of German combat memoirs of WWII (mostly), this is a 1947 memoir by a Panzer VI Tiger driver who fought on the Eastern Front, it says here. Its German title was the Wagnerian Panzerdämmerung. But there …