Best-looking guns?

The Russian Degtarjev was also great in ww2.

 

One of my 'favorite' guns. Actually, my only Favorite.
The Stevens company of Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, got into the buffalo rifle business right after the Civil War and when the country ran out of buffalo they just downsized the rifles and kept the same reliable falling/sliding block action.
This "Favorite" Model 1915 in 22 Long Rifle was inexpensive and pitched to ordinary people for squirrels which were a part of the diet back in them days, especially in the south. The silencer allowed you to sit out in a grove of pecan trees and quietly pop squirrel after squirrel without alerting the other squirrels (which would all hide at the crack of an unsuppressed .22 shot). A .22 Maxim silencer cost $4 back in those days, and the bigger ones for centerfire rounds commanded the princely sum of $7.
This has a 24 inch barrel which is insanely long for a .22 LR today, but back then optics weren't really a thing and nobody could afford the few available anyway. Instead, you got precision by lengthening the sight radius, thus the long barrel and the sight way back on the tang.
The knob below the receiver allows you to take down the rifle to conveniently fit in a bag for transport or storage.
This one was made between 1915 and 1920 with a threaded barrel for the old Maxim silencer, which came with the gun if you desired and could afford the extra four bucks. Modern silencers have a different thread pitch so I had to find an adapter to change it from 1/2-20 to 1/2-28 thread to mount this new silencer.
I love this rifle even though I don't shoot it very much. I got it out yesterday morning and plinked away in the cool morning sunshine from my veranda. There is no semi-auto action like on most of my .22s to create that louder 'clack' noise, so with subsonic rounds it just makes a little 'pop' about as loud as one of those ladyfinger firecrackers we played with as kids. The squirrels would never hear you coming.

 

You just shoot them in the ass, which is enough to launch them forward at considerable velocity.

.

 

What kind of trajectory are you getting? The holdover for a 100-yard shot must be pretty high but the foot-pounds of a buffalo landing would be considerable!

KB your Stevens is a beauty Anf that tang sight might work with a buffalo. I have a great affinity for a single shot rifle. Once had a beauty of a German one, 22 lr. nicely browned thought not intentionally. Had folding leaf rear sights and double set triggers, still a mystery as to why. Herman Goering had one, of course in presentation grade, and still like new....It resides in the US Infantry Museum at nearby Ft. Benning..

Gaines

 

I take back what i said about the Weatherby. Browning makes the best looking sporting arms. From the only civilian semi-auto than can chamber 7mm Remington or 300 Winchester magnum:



To the best-looking falling block rifle there is:

 

And speaking of best-looking falling blocks...

Here is the Sharps "Big Fifty," the non plus ultra of black powder single shot breechloaders. Among the rifles of the day, this was the Mona Lisa, the Tower of Pisa, the Mickey Mouse, the Napoleon Brandy. This example is a Model of 1874 or Hartford Model chambered for the .50-90 round. It would also chamber and fire the .50-100 and 50-110 (more grains of black powder, lighter bullets for longer ranges). The Big Fifty played a leading role in the slaughter of the buffalo on the plains, and it can be argued that in that role the big Sharps and Remingtons of the time did more to subdue the plains Indians than the Springfield trapdoors of the US Army. The Big Fifty was a sporting weapon, of course, but it very certainly had one hell of a military application. The gun will always be famous for Billy Dixon's famous 1,538-yard killing shot of a mounted Commanche at the battle of Adobe Walls. Sporting gun or not, if I had been designing a black powder army in the late 1870s I would have wanted Sharps M1874s for my sharpshooter units. The Sharps was not only an amazing performer for its day but a beautiful and beautifully made gun as well. The gun illustrated is actually a Shiloh Arms reproduction, but it echoes the steampunk craftsmanship of the original.

 

Winchester 1886. The best lever action design (by no less than John Browning.)



It even has two locking lugs.

 

This is a nice Browning .308, I sighted it in for my son before the past deer season. It does not come with swivel studs. BLR

 

My newest best-looking gun. I've only just ordered this 9mm carbine and they are selling faster than the maker can build them, which is a good sign. It make take a couple of months before I have this in hand. The most attractive thing about this (besides looking like an Uzi mated with a AK47 paratrooper rifle) is that there ain't no plastic anywhere in the gun. It's marketed strictly to fudds like myself. Let the kids play with them plastic guns, this is made for manly men, out of metal, for manly purposes.
Interesting story behind these. The Maker, some guy named Wilkinson back in the seventies, decided that the world need a four pound side-charging blowback pistol the size of a cocker spaniel. As you may know, a blowback pistol operates by using a heavy slide to hold the recoiling cartridge in place long enough for the cartridge to stay in the chamber for enough time to prevent your eyebrows from burning off. It also requires an enormously heavy spring to push that slide back into battery so you can fire it again and start burning off facial skin. Off course that spring hits the chamber with enough force to knock your aim down towards towards your toes where you may lose other appendages beside eyebrows.
To be fair, blowback works pretty darned good with light cartridges from .22 up to about .380, but 9mm is above the limit for strictly blowback handguns. John Browning pretty much eliminated blowback with his locked breech 1911, way back in 1911 - though guns like the Luger and Borchard preceded that with more complex designs.
Anyway, as awful as blowbacks are in a handgun, it works just fine in a carbine. All the pistol caliber carbines from the MP 18 (and related European designs from that era) were all simple blowback guns. Even the Thompson in .45 ACP dropped the blish lock in WWII and converted those to a blowback mechanism. It's a simple matter of having a stock and forearm to hold the thing on target. It's simple, it works well, and except for a few fussy guns like the MP5, blowback is the way to go with pistol caliber carbines.
SO, back to Wilkinson and his four pound side-charging handgun with a 31 round magazine. Despite all his business acumen, he found there was no market at all for a four pound handgun (probably 5 or 5 1/2 pounds loaded). He could have converted it to belt feed and welded a bipod to the front, but instead he attached a stock and a 16 inch barrel (making it a legal rifle). The best thing is that since it feeds from the grip, it makes it 6 or 8 inches shorter than similar carbines with the mag well near the front of the receiver.
Also, with the folding stock it makes it handy to hide under my jacket in case I need to hold up a liquor store. At any rate, in the seventies and eighties this short and light little folding carbine was selling well to police units until the mini 14 put them out of business.
Now they are collectors items and selling at insane prices, so some guy bought the remaining parts and design blueprints and is making them again.
One is mine (or soon will be), and I need this in case the dog tangles with another herd of javelina (or I need to rob a liquor store). This has happened twice now (the dog, not the liquor store), so I really need this gun. Or, a new dog, but I love that dog...

 

The designer in me really likes the clean purposeful look. It also looks solid and substantial. . Since the MG 42 stamped guns had proliferated, even my sig 228 is stamped, folded over a mandrel and welded. Thought it is a flawless performer and hard to tell it is not milled, I still like guns that are milled. this one looks solid. To me, it has that "right" look for it's purpose.

Gaines

 

The receiver is aluminum, cast and then milled. So, it is a pretty old-school firearm, which is why I'm attracted to it. It weighs only six pounds, which is a pound less than a Sten gun, as surprising as that sounds. The magazine in the photo is 18 rounds, which is substantial enough for any needs I may have. I'll likely order some of the 32 round mags for playing with. I've been walking miles every day with this new hound that came into my life, and down here on the border there are a lot of people coming across and I run into them pretty frequently. Almost all of them are just harmless types only interested in where the nearest water is. But, there are also some drug smugglers (maybe you recall some of the incidents I recounted in that long thread when I first moved here). I don't *really* need this gun, but since a pistol is only good to the same range as any pistol armed smugglers, and standard rifles are heavier than I want to drag around, a carbine with +P or +P+ ammo gives me about 125 yard stand-off safety. It'll also stop any javelina if Lucy gets tangled up with them again. She's gotten into two fights with herds of them - they do not like dogs! Popping of rounds into the dust with the .22 I've been carrying doesn't bother them much, but the noise did eventually turn them before the dog got hurt on both occasions.

.

 

Oh, I forgot to mention (for the technical minded among us, meaning just Gaines), that the gun stole, er copied, the telescoping bolt invented by Uzi Gal for his well known submachine gun, the Uzi. What that means is that instead of requiring another six inches (or so) of space at the rear of the receiver for the spring, the bolt itself is sprung (and 'telescopes,' wraps around/overlaps, the breech of the barrel. It's easier to understand in a technical drawing than for me to articulate it, but all that space at the rear of the receiver on a standard subgun is no longer required, and with the mag feeding into the grip you also save a bunch of length at the front of the receiver where the mag well and chamber would normally be. This gun is using every technical advance known to shorten the action, which also cuts the weight by a pound or two even with its milled receiver. The only way to make it shorter would be to cut the barrel below the legally required 16 inch length, and that would require a tax stamp for an SBR (Short Barrelled Rifle) and since it took me a year to get my last silencer I don't even want to mess with the ATF again. With a receiver that short, I don't need to shorten the barrel.

.

 

I think this Remington action has a certain aesthetic something:
Rock Island Auction: Remington Arms Inc Rolling Block-Rifle 11 mm

 

The Rolling Block is one of a number of American single shot rifles developed during and after the civil war. Everyone knows about the Sharps, which started as a cap n' ball with a paper rolled cartridge fed from the breech which later developed into a cased round famed for the buffalo slaughter in the west. But there were a number of other less successful designs all varying slightly from the falling block patented by Sharps. The Army (as armies will) chose the least expensive alternative, cutting a hinged breech into the old Springfield rifle to create the "Trapdoor" Springfield.
Americans all know about the Sharps, but only about 120,000 were ever made (not counting modern reproductions). While the US military was still fooling around with the Trapdoor rifle, Remington was selling Rolling Blocks by the millions in military contracts to something like 45 different countries, and untold numbers in various sporting calibers to civilians across North America. As late as WWI, the French bought over 100,000 in 8x50 Lebel for rear echelon troops. Even the British Navy got in on the action and purchased some thousands in .275 Rigby (7x57 Mauser) in 1916. Basically, any cartridge could be adopted to the Rolling Block, and Remington was set up to produce them very quickly in any caliber at very reasonable prices.



.

 

IJN Yamato
18.1 inches of badassery

 

I suspect those are too well and uniformly dressed to be anything but government troops, though no doubt Zapata and Villa were also buying rolling blocks. They were the best deal going at the time.


.