I've got a bit of a soft spot for falling block single shot rifles, especially those with a British heritage, no doubt because I spent many years in London as a child and got to visit Thomas Bland and Sons gunshop just off The Strand occasionally. As a result my first centrefire rifle was a ...
Who was Winston Churchill's preferred gunmaker? Many will assume that he patronized gunmakers who made the best that the pre-war London gun trade could offer: and so names such as Purdey, Holland & Holland or Boss might come to mind. But Churchill was a keen and knowledgeable sporting shooter, and he was a man who ...
A Light Sufficiently Powerful Rifle with Mild Recoil The 6.5x57 Mauser rifle cartridge has been with us for over a hundred years and yet it has not become obsolete. Rifles in 6.5x57 are still made by a number of European manufacturers and in Europe its main competitor is the Scandinavian 6.5x55 Swedish (and Norwegian) which is ...
Introduction Austria has produced some of the most famous firearms in the world. In the modern era the Austrian Glock has become "the" must have pistol for civilians and law enforcement alike. The Glock "plastic fantastic" can be found on the hip of law enforcement officers in the United States, Britain, Australia, and if you visit ...
You Can't Kill Deader than Dead Walter Dalrymple Maitland Bell quietly went from being just another adventurer trying his hand at being a professional ivory hunter to becoming nothing short of a legend. In his years elephant hunting he bagged exactly 1,011 elephant, which led to him acquiring a quite significant cache of crisp British pound ...
The Rocket Ball and Volition Rifle The quest that would lead to the development of the lever action rifle began with a man from New York named Walter Hunt who reasoned that before he could design a practical repeating rifle he needed to create a self contained cartridge that it could do its repeating with. Walter ...
One Size Does Not Fit All The Colt Lightning rifle was created as Colt's answer to Winchester and Marlin's lever action rifles and it seems odd that it was not more successful than it was, although the medium and small frame Lightning rifles certainly racked up decent sales numbers. But if you think about it, the ...
Annie Oakley's Early Life Annie Oakley was born Phoebe Ann Mosey on August 13, 1860, less than a year before the American Civil War began. Her father was Jacob Mosey and her mother Susan Wise and Annie was the sixth of their nine children. The family were Quaker Christians and lived in a log cabin in ...
A Pair of "Barn Find" Rifles The Winchester Model 70 has long been called "The Rifleman's Rifle" since they hit the gun racks in gun dealers and hardware stores back in 1937. The Model 70 was, back then, considered an upgrade of Winchester's first bolt action offering, the Model 54, but it established for itself an ...
Background: the Heym SR20 and the Heym SR21 I've owned just one F.W. Heym rifle over the years, and that was an SR20N chambered for the .308 Winchester: It was a great rifle and became a favorite. I purchased it in the early 1980's and only parted with it in the mid-1990's when I was going ...
