Best-looking guns?

Keith was a great authority on firearms and a significant figure in ammo development, yes, but I do think he was something of a nut. After looking closely at some of the powerful ammo loads already commercially available in the 30s and 40s for familiar calibers like the .38 Special, .38 Super ACP, and so on, I can only wonder why Keith thought monstrous things like the .41 and .44 magnums were even necessary. I can see the .357, I suppose, but what's the point beyond that?

He also did strange and possibly irresponsible things sometimes. I have read a story of how he was driving down a road with one of the handguns he was working on, spotted some critter, and just stopped the car and popped the poor thing, just like that. Possibly because that was just a technical weapon-ammo-target problem to him, possibly because he could do it, maybe just because he felt like it. Some shootists and hunters might disagree, but I find such a casual attitude a little odd.

 

Even when I was young and foolish I couldn't help but wonder how many game animals he crippled trying to prove a heavy revolver could do that job at 500 yards. It's all well and good if the elk falls over right there and becomes sausage, but quite another when they are gut shot and run over the ridge out of sight.


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Nurse!

Not just a Nordenfelt, but a ten barrel Nordenfelt on a fine carriage.
Sold last year for £81k
Bonhams : An Exceptionally Rare Nordenfelt .43(Spanish) Ten-Barrelled Centre-Fire Mechanical Gun

 

Strange that those would be around years after the Gatling. Maybe patents kept them from using the more practical mechanism?

 

I am going to get a little Gallic here. When people think of classic modern firearms they don’t often think of anything designed by the French. French designs are too easily dismissed as simply odd, old-fashioned, or funny-looking. Think of the Hotchkiss MMG with those huge trombone-like cooling fins, or the MAS 38 with the stock and barrel out of line with each other. Well, French weapons may have looked peculiar and had some eccentric features, but they did work and some of them served the French and other armies well enough for an amazingly long time. I also think some of them were very handsome in their own very French way. Case in point: the Mannlicher-Berthier rifle and carbine series. The Berthiers were certainly odd enough. They had that strange French two-piece bolt and the Mannlicher clip which everyone likes to sneer at. The clip on the early guns (90 and 92 carbines, 07/15 rifle) held only three rounds, a limitation to say the least. But the French kept working on the design, striving to improve it. They increased the clip to five rounds on the 1916 rifle and carbine, and most of the 92 carbines seem to have been modified to take the five round clip. The 92/16 carbine was in fact a neat little gun, often seen in WWII images and a favorite of the French police. The final and best modification was the M07-15 M34, which was the 07/15 rifle with a shorter barrel and new sights re-chambered to the new 7.5x54mm rimless cartridge feeding from a five round Mauser-type stripper clip. The resulting weapon was much more modern than the earlier Berthiers and a good deal more handsome than the MAS 36. The early 1890 carbine was pretty ugly, but all the later Berthiers were visually pleasing. The 07/15 and 1916 rifles had long, slender, and almost elegant barrels and forestocks, perfectly suited for the ‘knitting kneedle’ bayonet. The M34 was well proportioned, a perfect, trim looking balance of the carbine’s compactness and the slim beauty of the long rifles. If I could get a Berthier I’d go for the M34, I think, though only about 60,000 were made. (Unlike the other Berthiers I’ve never seen a photo of French troops using the M34.) These guns lasted in service a very, very long time. The Berthier is generally considered a WWI weapon, but in 1940 Berthiers probably outnumbered all the other French rifles in service. The Greeks and Rumanians used them, among others, and some even wound up with the British Home Guard. The Berthiers remained in second and third line use in the Indochinese and Algerians conflicts. The ex-French colonies in Africa and Asia inherited many of them after independence, and no doubt some are still kicking around in those parts of the world. The French police clung to their 92/16 carbines for decades after the war.

 

"Strange that those would be around years after the Gatling. Maybe patents kept them from using the more practical mechanism?"

The Gatling lasted longer than you might think. The Montana National Guard brought one to Butte in September 1914 for use against the striking copper miners. It wasn't the portable model, either, but the old Custer-era type on the artillery carriage.

 

Lasted even longer...
Reminds me of a thread I started years ago about using these in the tails of Lancasters of B-29s..."would have a devastating effect" - FormerJughead

 

Churchill wrote that he did kill a Dervish or two at the battle of Omdurman. Have a C96 Broomhandle myself. It's the 1930 variation (the last) and was made for the Chinese. Even has Chinese characters on it saying "Made in Germany".

 

Beautiful Half Track! My A5 is a Sweet 16 made in the 1950s. Has its own action size. Just finished using it to take a couple of limits of sage grouse out here in Wyoming.

 

A Rock Island feed alerts me to the Colt Paterson Pocket Model.
Very nice, if you like great big old-style cap revolvers that appear to have contracted achondroplasia in early life. (Seems I do like that...)

Image from an earlier sale:
Rock Island Auction: Rare Colt Paterson Pocket Model (Baby Paterson) Revolver

 

I don't think I'd want to carry a pistol with an exposed trigger like that in my pocket. For cap and Ball I tend to favor the Dragoons or Remingtons.

When I got out of college I went home for a while waiting for a response to the job aplications. While there I took an after hours metal working class hosted at the local high school and taught by the metal shop teacher. At one point he showed us the project one of his high school students was working on. A very pretty under hammer cap and ball single shot. The student had done all the work including the barrel for solid stock and chosen a very nice piece of cherry for the grip. Up until then I wasn't big on under hammers but ...

 

Oh, no one has gone into hunting rifles yet. Well, this wins it in that category:

 

All Pattersons are extremely rare, a few fakes out there too, but the pocket model is the rarest of the rare. The trigger pops down when you cock it, or , at least, is supposed too ! .

Speaking of rare a real hunting gun is rare with a gloss finished stock. Most are rubbed oil so when you scratch it you can rub and plicit out. I have seen a few Purdey;'s or Greeners with what appeared to be a gloss stock but they were oiled and riubbed twenty or so times. at an upcharge..

 

The OP said "Best looking guns " so I take him at his word. Just over 15 years ago I was ask to design a gun room for a shotgun collector. In the process I got to handle all these guns and shoot about 25. It is actually a vault, 8" of reinforced concrete on all 6 planes. HVAC and humidifier grates have steel rods, door is a 4 hour vault door with rods extending into the wall which was poured around them. Floor is old longleaf pine, walls and cabinets are cherry, guns are displayed so each half is split down the middle splayed 30 degrees out so you can see all the side plates. Purdey's, Bosses', Greener's, Webley's , Westley Richards', Aya's , list goes on. They are displayed against cream felt, , I thought dark green would hide the guns, a mistake on my part. When this was taken the guns were being rearranged so gaps appear. A hidden door, looks like a panel on the wall hides the vault door inside and out. Family silver and important papers also there.

Click right, 8 pictures. If you get to a sketch of a gun mechanism you have gone to far, going back if you get to my late Labrador, also too far .

https://get.google.com/albumarchive...wa&authKey=CJD585Cf5pSqNg#5666084365656253394

Many of these are too elaborate for my taste in guns, I like fire blue, nice but not excessively grained walnut but prefer the gun to have good proportions, fine craftsmanship in it's working parts and a nice fit over ornamentation....Just personal .

Jobs like this are why I keep working at 77 !! But I get very few like this, obviously.

Gaines

 

Beautiful...you could design a nice pub/bar methinks...

 

I spent a summer in the UK, drove 6100 miles in an original Mini, and went through every shire, always looking for freehold pubs for lunch and supper. Been is scores of them, unique institutions. I would love to do a real pub but hard to beat an old venerable. one. Best I ever frequented was in Devon, near Bovey Tracy. Front room was for regular folks. rear room for farmers in Wellingtons and those with dogs.....I chose the rear room., sorry, bit off topic Just an old Anglophile rambling !

 

Gentlemen, I give you the right arm of the free world.

This particular model of the FAL is the G1 (the first contract/sale of the FAL rifle), to the post-war German army. I particularly like the G1 because of its nice Belgian walnut that predates all the plastic furniture which followed in later editions of the rifle. This rifle, my rifle, started as a pile of beat up parts with a stock black from fifty years of embedded oil and cosmoline. It was a labor of love to bring this back to life. Each piece had to be cleaned and phosphated back to original factory condition. The wood spent weeks and weeks bathing in soapy water to draw out all the oil and chemicals, and then a nice refinish in old school linseed oil. The bore is absolutely pristine which makes sense since the Germans went on to the less expensive G3 and relegated the G1s to a storage bin somewhere. It's a fine shooter.

 

My opinion only, but that is exactly what I think of when I see the words "main battle rifle". That is one fine example of one fine gun, the epitome of it's class.. Glad you saved and restored it and great photo as well..

It is strange to me that I find them very aesthetically pleasing in photos but not nearly as much when I handle a real one. I think they are much smaller than they seem in pictures..

Gaines

 

They don't balance like a sporting rifle, because they are designed to be front-heavy for full auto fire, thus the slightly awkward handling. Mine of course, is semi-auto to satisfy the fine gentlemen at the ATF. Dieudonne Saive (who also brought Browning's Hi Power to life after the great man passed) is the main designer here, though he copied the actual mechanics from the STG44. He would have none of that stamped receiver business, so the receiver on these is a fine example of 20th century machining craftsmanship. I don't think you could gather enough craftsmen in one place today, to mass produce a rifle like this.


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I have some "main battle rifles" but they are of older stock. Take my Swedish Mauser, model 1896 in 6.5X55. It's old and very muzzle heavy due to the long barrel that was fashionable then. It's in excellent shape and extremely well made. Of all my old military rifles it is the only one that is sinfully accurate! To my eyes it's a damn good looking piece!