This week, join John, Kailey, Othais, and Mae from C&Rsenal as they dive into all things history! From collecting historical firearms to the craftsmanship and use of guns throughout history, plus insight of real-life battleships!

Watch C&Rsenal Here: https://www.youtube.com/@Candrsenal

Welcome to Goa State of the Second podcast.

I'm John, and today we're joined by Othais and May from CN Arsenal.

How are you, folks?

Good.

We've been doing the traditional Southern thing of debating foods for the past five minutes.

I mean, that's what it should be.

You think it was five minutes?

Yeah.

So let's go ahead and start off.

How did seeing Arsenal start?

How did you get into this?

What's the whole backstory between you two?

This one's favorite.

Yeah, unfortunately, it really is.

So actually, between the two of us, May was a shooter before I was, so she grew up with it.

I did not.

Just despite being raised in the south, it wasn't my family's bag at that time.

Not that my family didn't have guns, but just we didn't go shoot.

Meanwhile, for us, our family, essentially, it was a tool.

It was just like a really good pair of scissors in the household, essentially.

So I picked it up post college, sort of first job out of college, hanging out with one of the guys, went out to the farm to do some riding, some shooting, some things like that.

And that's the first time I really shot a rifle.

It was a Mosin M38 carbine, and I was given Sony earbuds for hearing protection.

So that woke me up a little bit.

I might have some permanent damage from that little adventure, but I was like, okay, this was fun.

Because I was like, oh, why would I need more than one?

Dating you a little bit?

Because the price on that.

Yeah, yeah.

So to be fair, at that time, that was probably not even the best price.

But.

But the mosins, to this day, people get fascinated by the number of markings because of all the refurbs and stuff they've been through.

So I did the same thing where I was like, what does any of this stuff mean?

And I did not find the answers I wanted to.

So I ended up buying books, and I didn't find the answers I wanted to.

So I kind of set that aside and started working on other guns, and I became a gun collector.

And in the process of this kind of process of researching things and finding the next thing that I want to look into and buying all these books, I lost track of what I was doing.

So I had to start writing notes to myself.

And since I was already doing that and I was already friends with like two photographers, I started taking photos of the firearms.

And then I would do little write ups and I would put it out on the Internet blog style.

And also Reddit was very big at the time and not as censored as it is now.

So I became really popular on Reddit.

Of all things, your pictures, your photography, it like was something people had never seen before.

Everybody loved it.

And now it looks so terrible.

We've gone so far beyond so bad compared to now.

But I guess it was sort of a niche hobby and people weren't putting a lot of attention to actually photographing and documenting on the Internet.

They were just doing it, you know, for their own magazines or trade journals or whatever you want to call them, like the hobby journals were doing it.

But publicly, you know, I kind of became a gateway for a lot of guys.

And so eventually we realized, well, we kind of need to make the jump to video.

And then to be perfectly honest, my family kind of imploded.

My parents were much older.

They had both pre.

Deceased.

Well, they predeceased me, which they should, but much earlier than you'd think, you know, in my early 20s.

And so my siblings kind of scattered.

I didn't really have much going on and other members of extended family were kind of dying left and right.

And I reached that age that, you know, in my 20s I was kind of in that position where most people are in their 40s, where family starts dying and you have to start kind of reinvesting in your future.

And I went, I don't want to do what I'm doing.

And so I kind of launched the video series.

I gave it like a, like a one year Hail Mary out of my savings to see what we could do May invested in as well.

And you know, she came in because I can't, I can't film myself shooting.

You know, I mean, you can.

A lot of people do selfie stuff now.

But at that time it was weird.

I was trying to do something a little higher brow.

So she became our designated markswoman so that I could film her.

Over time, she's learned to run the camera.

So now we both take responsibility for that.

But it gave me enough room to run what I was doing.

And then from there, as the show's grown and we've had more funding, she's taken over more and more roles and come in full time.

And so now we both do it.

Full time.

And then we eventually got Bruno, our animator, in like 30 something episodes in.

No, it's like 60 something.

Okay.

I couldn't remember.

We.

We did.

We ended up with a part time animator because we were doing 2D animations to sort of support how everything works.

Because the whole emphasis of the show was to have a very visual format to be able to show people exactly how these things work and where they came from.

And I was doing these horrendous 2D animations by.

By literally taking the guns apart and photographing everything and then animating it.

Pretty good for 2D.

Monty Python esque.

Yes.

But they did get the point across.

Except for you start getting stuff like the one that broke me was the Luger.

Because the way the Luger's trigger mechanism wraps around, you kind of need to see it from more than one angle to understand it.

You actually did have to show a second angle of it working.

And unlike a 3D animation where you define the object and then you could rotate the camera around with a 2D photo animation, I had to take photos from both directions, animate two separate animations, and then keyframe them together so that they work simultaneously.

So it's like exponentially more work than just a 3D at that point.

And I went, okay, hold on, this is going insane.

So I kind of voiced that actual concern on the show.

And someone who was watching the show, Bruno, actually reached out to me and said, well, you know, if you, if you want an animator, I just graduated from this arts program and everything.

And I went, okay, can you come on up?

So he ended up moving over to Charleston with us.

I do love him showing up, by the way, because he didn't tell us he was coming.

So now Sarah has me, who does most of the research and stuff like that, May, who does most of the editing and handles the sort of business management side of it and a lot of the camera and audio now.

And then we have Bruno the animator, and that's really it.

We have other people that come in as needed ad hoc for certain sub settings of things.

But yeah, we've got like patent researchers overseas for us.

Currently we have some people doing little things for ammo acquiring and stuff like that.

Yeah, Suze does a lot of ammunition now.

Yes, Suz will help out with ammo loading.

Every once in a while we get somebody that takes on a special project because they're invested in it and they're willing to help us out with that project.

But generally, in terms of core team, there's just the three of us.

So you started what, about 10 years ago?

Right.

Oh, okay.

Actually, we just passed our anniversary on the fifth.

That would have been nine though, right?

Wait, what year is it?

20, 24.

Nine years.

There you go.

All right.

Now, we've done article work and had the website up for several years before that.

Yes.

So some of your first videos were all about World War I, the Great War Guns.

Was it just a happy medium that it fell in right around that 100 year anniversary?

It was like the worst thing I ever did.

Yeah, literally the worst thing you've ever done.

I was a World War II collector and the.

We had, we had the guys from a series on YouTube called the Great War that a lot of people enjoy.

Yes, I love them.

They reached out to us for licensing images and I said, well, actually we're about to start doing video.

Would you like to do video with us?

And they said, sure.

And we came up sort of livestream idea, but the problem is they're doing World War I.

So I went, well, I got all this World War II stuff here, but how hard can it be to really pull in some World War I stuff?

How could it be?

And wonderful question.

The problem is actually, at the time, World War I stuff was cheaper.

So it was not insane to think that I could just acquire what we needed and then move it along, you know what I mean?

And then luckily we had a friend of ours who actually had a substantial collection in town down the road from us, essentially.

Right?

So we're like, okay, we've got this, that and the other.

Oh, boy.

Because then, you know, Battlefield one drops.

The Great War is doing well.

All of a sudden the World War II stuff becomes very collectible in a way that it wasn't before.

And so it becomes almost punitive.

And then there's a lot more firearms than I realized in World War I because I was a World War II focused guy.

So I just promised something that was very hard to deliver.

And I guess what made the show is that I was willing to just keep delivering because I went, no, no, no, I already said I'd do this.

And then eight years later, we were still doing World War I.

It was literally until we could not do it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Great War is done.

We're still doing it, right?

So.

But we made it through as much as we could.

There's still some odd machine guns and sort of rare pieces that we're struggling to get in.

But we've done the vast majority of small Arms that were in World War I.

Well, it's, it's crazy when you think World War I.

You just think of like it seems like the Civil War.

Like it's, oh, these guns are the technology boom for firearms during that time.

And the amount of different guns in that time, the different changes in innovation, I mean, it's insane.

Oh yeah, we're, we're actually under a number of NDAs with current manufacturers.

Yep.

Because a lot of times it's easier to reach out to me to a very expensive like patent researcher and they'll just sort of say quietly like, hey, you're.

Could you sign this NDA real quick?

Yeah.

Okay.

What's up?

Have you seen this before?

Yes.

1914.

Yes.

1910.

Yes.

1905.

Do you know the solution to this?

What?

And so I'll just pull up examples on that and I'll tell them this might not be the first one.

I just know of this one.

And they're sitting there going, I thought I invented something new.

And you're going, no, no.

Because there's so many people were working on these problems at the time.

And it's just funny where the bottlenecks are.

It might be a cartridge development issue, it might be a gas system issue, but there's a lot of ideas around those core functionalities that were already developed but then not implemented well until some other emergent technology comes out.

We actually see this a lot in the handgun world because until you have metallic cartridge, it's kind of hard to do a lot of things that are, let's say double action.

Because if you end up with a failed cook off or something like that, you get out of time and blah blah.

So it's just simpler to do single action, blah, blah, blah.

Well, once you have reliable metallic cartridge, all these ideas kind of come back around, but they've already been patented and the patents have already expired.

So now they're in the public domain and people are going insane with them.

And it's just interesting how much people were sort of too far ahead of the wave and they didn't profit by it, but they had the right idea of where we were going.

Right.

Just the amount of changes and iterations of his designs throughout those years is just insane to think about.

What's crazy is actually if you start exploring sort of the pre Browning era is how much he didn't invent, but rather deeply refined and combined there's a lot of times that Browning would end up in these sort of like either threats of lawsuit or lawsuit because the core concept actually was already out there.

It's just that it wasn't done anywhere near as efficiently, which was, you know, people kind of remark on him being a genius for thinking these things up in his head and never really drawing them.

Having an idea that just appears in your head that is like a core concept of how something might lock together.

Not that remarkable for someone that has that kind of mindset.

Most engineers are able to do that.

The interesting thing is how that he was able to iterate on his designs in his own head to sort of say, well, wait, where's the waste?

And being able to keep multiple points of contact in his mind and sort of go, well, hold on, can I delete this and put it over here and get both functionality at once.

And he's like, yes, you can.

And he also got a lot of help, though, from, like, Winchester and Colt.

They would also help refine the designs down tighter.

And that efficiency, I think, is what people really appreciate about his work.

They might not voice it that way because they don't understand that's what they're really seeing.

It's hard to get away from.

Most handguns use that system now because it's so efficient, so crazy that you.

Right.

But then again, most people don't realize most modern handguns, okay, so you lock.

You guys would be familiar with this.

You like a Glock, there's sort of an extension over the chamber that locks into the slide, and that's your locking surface.

Now, that gun used sort of a dual camming system, like a horizontal diagonal line that would bring the barrel back and down, not tipping, but sort of.

Parallel, but it locks into that block in the back of the receiver.

But that gun is the first one I know of that locked sort of an extension over the barrel into the actual hole for the ejection in the slide.

So your actual port in the slide that you already have to have.

So Browning use separate lugs.

They didn't take advantage of the already existing hole that you had to have the slide in order to kick out your spent casings.

Whiting did.

So most modern guns are actually sort of a combination of Browning's design and Whiting's design.

But we never think about it that way because we just see the Browning part of it, you know?

Oh, yeah.

You don't think.

I mean, Browning had such a large name, Everyone still contributes him to the high Power.

Even though he didn't finish the high power.

Yes.

Which is the same man who made the.

The fal.

Right.

So it's like, okay, well, Browning's just got this big name, and I think that's just because he came up with so many designs.

Oh, he was absolutely prolific.

Yeah.

And extremely efficient in what he was doing, like I said before, and his ability to sort of move between and also to do iterations of the same concept over and over again.

We often talk about the Winchester 97.

We have one here today that I brought in for you.

But around the same time, he was designing what became the, I believe, the Stevens 500, which is, you know, that sort of humpback shotgun that we're all kind of familiar with, the old Sears that a lot of people used to have.

It's like nearly on top of the 97.

He was already designing that and several other shotguns.

If you go over to, like, we have friends at the Cody firearms Museum, There's a number of shotgun designs that are there that never got produced by anybody that were also perfectly valid ways of doing the same thing.

So he had this way of sort of making multiple approaches and sealing out all the competition because he's like, well, we could do it this way.

We could do it this way.

You could do this way.

Normally it takes five inventors to come up with those five ways because.

And then he just patents them all, and it's like, aha, they're all mine.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, even when he came out with the.

What was it?

The 86 lever shotgun.

What was that?

85.

I believe it's 85.

But now we're doing.

We're going way back.

Yeah.

Even then he was like, this is inefficient.

Why are we doing this?

And Winchester was like, well, we make lever guns.

Oh, oh, oh.

You're talking about the 87.

I'm sorry, I'm thinking of the original.

The original falling block rifle.

Yeah.

But you're talking about the 87 lever action shotgun.

Yes, yes.

Yeah, yeah.

No, because he's like, this is there.

Says, we want a lever action shotgun.

He goes, that's.

That's inherently Stupid.

And they're going, yeah.

But we do lever actions.

He goes, okay.

And he manages to make one.

But because it's naturally like this, they're sort of mortal enemies.

The lever action and the shotgun concept, it comes out terrible.

But everybody wants one.

Because of Terminator.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

To be fair, everybody wants.

When everybody thinks they can twirl it, they don't realize how heavily modified the one from Terminator was that you could do that twirl.

We've actually already filmed with one of those things.

They're so awful.

They really are.

They really are terrible, terrible firearms.

But beautiful.

But absolutely gorgeous.

Don't care for using them?

No.

They look great.

Oh yeah.

Cool.

The manual of arms is confusing.

Like in terms of where your cartridges rest.

Like it's just anything.

Any gun that sort of palms a cartridge on you is not my favorite because once it's out of sight, it's like the Spencer pump action shotguns.

They have a little spot where they can hide a cartridge on you.

The Madsen.

Oh yeah.

The Madsen machine gu.

Madsen machine gun for the same reason can kind of hide a cartridge on you.

And there's nothing worse than a gun that can make a cartridge just sort of disappear in this negative space.

And then you have to keep working it and hope that it comes out.

Bothers the crap out of me.

Oh yeah.

Well, I mean it's.

It's crazy to think like you pulled this out of the case when we were downstairs.

I smiled like a school girl.

You did.

Excellent.

For audio listeners.

We.

We brought along a Winchester 97 trench gun.

And actually we brought along Remington Model.

10 much they can see.

Well, not on the audio.

Okay.

Some of these guys are listening audio.

So there's a Winchester.

There's a World War I era fixed frame Winchester 97 dredge got in the room with.

With a matching bayonet.

That's true.

And it has brought much joy to me.

He.

He knew how to pull up my heartstrings.

I.

It's true.

I, you know, I.

I fell in the same boat as you when I first started off.

And I'm going to date myself too.

Many of us did.

89 bucks.

And then I got into the surplus game, right?

And it's so cool.

The surplus game is so cool.

And a lot of people just don't do it.

And I don't understand why.

Then I got the Nagant Revolver.

And then I bought.

I showed you guys the pictures of the ruby and all these things and you go, these are designs that are just.

Have gone.

I mean, just look at the Spanish.

The amount of designs the Spanish have copied.

And you can get them on the surplus market for next to nothing.

Oh, yeah, you're right.

I'm actually.

I'm struggling to find a particular Spanish gun because I can't get one for myself because they're always priced wrong.

The Spanish made a lot of copies of the Merwin Hulbert, and there are a great many Merwin Horowitz that have.

Merwin Hulberts.

I can't speak.

That have sold for well over $1,000 today that are clearly Spanish copies.

But what they do is somewhere along the lines the markings got rubbed off conveniently.

And you can tell if you know what you're doing, but it's.

It's kind of hard to tell.

And so there's a lot of very high dollar Spanish Merwin Hulberts out there.

Now where I'm going, I just want an actual Spanish one for.

For the Spanish price.

Yeah.

So that I can talk about this period of Spanish history.

But no, everybody's charging for it like it's an American one and no one knows that they're out there.

It's something like 1 in 10 is not an American mall.

I wonder how many poor bastards are pulling theirs out of the drawer right now and just going, oh, crap.

Yeah, well, look close, because if you don't have the actual US Markings as supposed to be exactly right.

Then it's probably that they.

So if it's sort of scrubbed off blank, there's a good chance that those weren't Norwich markings that were scrubbed off.

It's probably Spanish markings that were scrubbed off.

Well, we.

I think when we were at the gathering, that was the one I talked to you about, because that was the one I just found out about was the Merwin Hulbert, where you pull the barrel and all the cartridges eject.

And if you look back and think about all the gun companies that have gone under over the years and the designs, they were up in quality with Colt and Smith at the time, but they were not making their own stuff.

That's.

That's it.

It was.

It was.

Okay.

Was it Hopkins?

I believe was.

Yeah, Hopkins was making theirs.

So it was sort of a licensed design.

And Hopkins Allen's actually made their own sort of like large frame guns that were kind of long forgotten now because they were rimfire for the most part.

But yeah, there's a lot of good quality that has just sort of disappeared, especially from the history books.

It's fun that we actually.

I'm wearing a T shirt and nobody can see it, but we actually came out with a T shirt last year for the fondue lock work, which was a Belgian patent that we managed to locate thanks to.

And by the way, we really appreciate our patronage.

Almost all of our shows funded by patron dollars.

And so I took some of those funds and I paid for a friend of mine to take some time, thankfully, because if I paid an actual guy to do this, it would have been a lot more expensive.

But he was willing to go over to the Belgian archives and just dig Belgian patent archives for us.

Because we know that a lot of revolver history is hidden in the Belgian patent archives.

Everybody thinks of America as sort of revolver central.

No, it's actually mostly Britain and Belgium, especially Belgium were sort of the innovators of the revolver once Colt left off.

And a lot of that history is completely forgotten.

So I'll read books on Smith and Wessons and they say, oh, yeah, they were looking at these three lockworks and I can sit there and go, that's a shamelo Delvigne.

That's a fanu.

That's a whatever.

And they ultimately chose the worst lock work of the three for this one design.

And it's probably because they were afraid of being hit by a patent lawsuit in Europe because it was marketed the European market because it was a double action.

But that's nowhere in that text, nor is the speculation in that text, because this is a person who's only studied Smith and Wessons or maybe only US revolvers.

So they have no clue that this is actually a Belgian design that has just been brought over and explored because they probably got sample pieces from Belgium.

Everybody went to Liege for ideas in the handgun market at that time.

And so we've been unraveling that mystery.

Anybody that wants to see what we're doing, by the way, all of it goes onto our website.

So it's like revolvers.c and arsenal.com and all the patents are there as we can get them processed.

We have a guy that's been volunteering on Discord to help us access.

And we just dump them all in there.

I pay for them to go get found or I pay the fees to get them, you know, copied out.

And we're just.

We're just trying to unpack as much as we can.

But, you know, everybody likes the Colt Pythons, all the snake guns.

Most of the Smith and Wesson lock work that we're familiar with.

Although they did make a change in their slide rebound.

Wow.

Yeah, that's just mind blowing.

I mean, there's a lot of things that people don't.

I mean, we talk about the revolver.

History is a big one because everyone's like, oh, Colt was the first one.

Yeah, but it wasn't cold.

There was other ones out there before Colt even patented his.

And even then there was arguments between him and other people on who should own the patents or even European patents versus US Patents.

We talk about.

I mean, look at Browning.

He split his patents between FN and Colt for a long time because one was European market, one was American market and Colt couldn't sell stuff to the European market.

Yeah, I mean, Colts, Colts, initial revolver seems to be some combination of.

There's.

It seems to, by the way, it's design suggest that he was aware of the precursor designs, even though he denies it, which of course he would because Colts ultimate appeal is that he's the quintessential American.

He's a salesman who is attempting to drag the rest of the world.

God, he's a salesman.

Yeah.

He attempted to drag the rest of the world into understanding the concept of economy of scale.

And at that time in the arms industry, we didn't have it, the idea that, okay, we need to make, we want to make this firearm.

If we can use machinery and jigs and whatever to make 10,000 of it, minimum, exactly the same way, then we can get the price down and then.

And you can see it in court records and stuff at the time, because he was, he was actually drawn into a court in England when they were trying to.

England was having a debate about starting their own state manufacturing and some things like that.

They were trying to get cost data from Colt on the cost to produce certain things.

Colt's deepest secret was how much it actually cost him to make his revolvers.

He was willing to sell them at a price below other people in the market for what you're getting.

But he wasn't willing to sell them at, you know, a thin margin.

He got a hefty margin on everything.

Because being the first person to really approach this economy of scale, he should reap all the benefits of It.

So he only thought about competing with the market price.

He didn't care about beating the market price deeply, which would essentially have driven everybody else out of business.

It probably would have been the smarter move for him to do that, because if he could have gotten his prices down, we now know discount marketing is the way to sort of kill a market.

But the problem is then you permanently drive that market down.

So maybe, maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong.

The point being is he hid his cards.

However, he did have to explain to the British, you don't understand.

You have to give me almost all the money up front so that I can buy the machines to do this.

And they're like, well, let's just give you some of the money up front, and then when it's all here, we'll give you the rest.

He's like, but I need the machines to do the thing, so you got to give me all the money so I can do the thing.

And they're going, but these other tradesmen that have been here for hundreds of years, we pay them piecework.

And he's like, yes, they've had hundreds of years to get these tools into place.

And then also they can't do it for that price in that economy because they don't.

They can't afford to buy the machine.

It's very interesting.

So through his sort of like essentially lying, I mean, just constantly lying and overselling and pushing and pushing and pushing.

He got people to understand this concept.

And then immediately after that, you suddenly see the next generation of firearms is people banding together, various prominent gunsmiths banding together to form things like fn, which was a coalition of gunsmiths in order to produce for the government so that they didn't have their manufacturing taking away from their country.

Because that was the big fear after that was like, well, hold on.

The first person to sort of be able to make everything, like Steyr and owg, Steyer and Austria, they're going to put everybody out of business in their own countries unless these gunsmiths band together and buy the same sort of equipment.

And so it's fascinating how he sort of pushed the industrial revolution, essentially, or at least the portion of it that would be like mass manufacturing interchangeable parts.

He pushed it by essentially lying about what he could do, but that started to get the capital available to do it.

And now that's how our entire economies work.

Like, we do everything on the scale method now.

So really innovative, but poorly understood because most people are just like, he made the Best revolver.

And you're like, okay, but that's so not what's important about Colt.

I still say Colt is one of the most fascinating individuals in history.

If I could ever have the actual truth of a man's life, Colt is the singular person I would pick out and be like, done.

I want everything that's actual truth on him.

The amount of times Colt went bankrupt, just in the beginning.

Oh, yeah.

With other people's money, too.

Yeah.

Like bankruptcy.

That's the important part in the fires.

He was truly a salesman.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

His.

What was.

It was.

The first one was with the Patterson.

And then after the Patterson came out, it was the.

Oh, he did more than that.

He designed a harbor defense system of subaquatic mines.

So he had these waterproof mines, and you would sit in this room.

The way it was supposed to work is you're supposed to sit in this little room at the corner of the bay and have these big mirrors that would let you see the bay.

And they were grave coordinates on the mirrors, like a grid, like a game of Battleship.

And you could literally go, oh, there's a boat at C5.

And push this button.

And then it would blow up the boat.

And they tested it, and it worked so well that it terrified everybody.

But the cost was prohibitive, so it was never put into place.

But his harbor defense system was basically like, we'll just mine the whole harbor, but it'll all be like, it won't blow up until we hit the button.

And you just have a guy that sits there, and if an enemy ship comes into the grid, he just hits the grid button, like, literally a game of Battleship and blows it up.

Just real life.

He was also responsible for the waterproofing.

So in that.

In doing that, he had to develop a waterproofing cabling method.

Well, that was actually used by Samuel Morse for the initial Morse testing for Morse code.

You know, same event or that.

But he was doing his, you know, telecommunication stuff.

And so he needed to run cable underwater.

And there's a famous test where he.

Both Sam Colt and Morse were trying to get investors for his technology.

And so they set up a thing where they were going to communicate between an island and the mainland.

It was an in lake island.

I can't remember which one now.

And they set everything up overnight.

And then the next day, it was a complete disaster because it didn't work.

Well, what they didn't know is that a fisherman, overnight, had been dredging and just hit the cable, was like, what is this?

He starts pulling it up.

He keeps pulling up and he keeps goes, to hell with this.

And he cuts it.

And then that's why the first, like.

That's why Morse, like, had a setback on the first go and couldn't get funding for another, like, five years or whatever it was.

It was him and Samuel Cole going, who the heck cut our cable?

Some dude in the middle of the night.

I love that.

Human Endeavor was set by, like, five years because some jerks just like, what is this?

Well, I mean, you think about all the military testing and how things have got set back.

I mean, you know how cool it would be to have a savage in 45?

Because.

Yeah, I mean, there's.

You say that it'd be cool because it's a failure at the time.

They're just like, this thing sucks.

So, like, the problem is, it's just like, they have high points in 45.

Go nuts, Bo.

Because it's going to be the same experience.

Well, there's all those things that, like the Luger and 45 that made the first trials, that everyone's like, oh, I want one.

And then my favorite is, everybody wants the.45 Luger.

And they're like, oh, yeah, it didn't work.

It didn't bother.

No, it worked great.

We wanted them to come back and do it again.

And Luger went, no, we're so tired of spending money on you.

You're going to make it.

This is actually a funny thing because it's very comparable to what we had with.40 Smith & Wesson, because everything goes in circles, right?

So the.

The luger is in a.30 caliber cartridge.

And they're like, oh, can we make it bigger?

And it's like, well, we could kind of straight wallet, and that'll give us 9 millimeter.

And so just as a kludge, you end up with 9 millimeter parabellum.

Like, the 9 millimeter parallel exists because it's like, I guess we could do that.

And then they're trying to sell it the US and they're trying to do anything they can to get a cartridge that the US would accept.

But the US is like, no, we want.45ACP essentially, for the precursor to that.

And they're going, if we do that, we have to build a whole new frame.

Everything has to be new, new tooling.

So we have to run a separate assembly line just for this little country.

I mean, it's big geographically.

By the time it was a small market, because for Germany, they had conscription.

So, like, the numbers of handguns that Germany Needed at a time compared to the US Is astronomically different.

So they're going like, the German army just bought these things from us.

We don't have to play around with America.

Like, we're going to sell like 2,000, 20,000 at most.

Like, where are we at?

You know, we don't even.

We don't know if we're going to get the contract.

They clearly favor their own guns.

This Browning guy's ripping us off at this point because he was.

Let's be honest, that's the thing that makes people very.

On the bottom half, you can look at.

We actually have a whole series on this where we approached it.

But the lock work, the slide, that's all Browning.

But the bottom half of that gun, it's like, oh, did it come up with a grip safety and a raked grip and a thumb depressible magazine release.

Oh, that's right.

Luger.

What do you mean thumb safety and everything?

It's almost like it took on all the best features of its chief competitor in order to win the trial, but also had a superior lock breach system.

How ingenious.

How.

How dare they.

Yeah, but no.

So the problem is Luger's like, we don't want to make two sizes of frame, which is what we ran into with 10 millimeter, where it's like, everybody's like, hey, can we get 10 millimeter?

And they're like, we'll have to make two sizes.

Well, three sizes.

Because then it would have been 45, 9 millimeter, and 10 millimeter.

All the group companies got together and were like, can we just make like 10 millimeter light that'll fit in a 9 millimeter frame?

And then everybody's just like, yeah, we'll tell them it's a good idea.

And then everybody ran with it for about 10 years.

And then, wait, this was awful.

Why did we do I still 40s dead.

I'm living.

I'm saying it right now.

40 is dead.

Smith & Wesson, anybody?

Yeah, anybody who wants 40.

Smith & Wesson should rethink their.

Their thought process.

The funniest part is that was done before when the US army wanted Colt brought a 9 millimeter.38 Colt.

There's 30 ACP, not 380.

They brought a 38 Colt in the original Browning lock breech pistols.

And the army says, We want 45.

And they're like, what's?

The most we could do without changing the frame.

And they got 40.

They tried to do on a 41, and it just wasn't working.

But it's the same thing all over again.

It's 40 Smith & Wesson.

100 years before 40 Smith & Wesson.

Like, it's the same thing.

It's like, okay, we got a nine.

Can we get.

How close can we get to this number?

It's like we could do 41, which is technically a 40.

Like, isn't it weird how it's just like, it's cyclical.

Well, it's weird.

Just like, what was it, the Prohibition?

The Colt came out with the.38 super, right?

And everyone's like, Wow, 38 Super.

Well, because it goes through corridors.

How.

Well, how did it go through car doors?

Because it was faster, Right.

And they were like, okay, that's all you need to do.

Yeah.

You could have just done that to begin with.

Sort of.

It's the same thing, like in Europe.

And I'm going to say it now, I watch a lot of your stuff.

So I'm so sorry.

Yeah, but just like in Europe, we're talking about Everybody.

When the 9 mil came out, everyone's like, oh, 9 mil.

And then there's the Italians.

Like, well, we want 9 mil.

We want it to feel like 9 mil, but our guns can't handle it.

So we're going to underpower it.

And then if you grab the wrong ammo, it blows up.

Well, sort of.

That was complete corruption.

So the man behind the Glenti pistol had already.

He was part of the trials board that was assessing it.

And so he's like, don't put my name on that.

Just.

We'll call it the Glass.

Like, he licensed it to glisten the glass entities, calling it the Glass Empty Pistol.

But it's actually this guy.

You know what I mean?

He's like, this is.

I'm going to vote yes on my own design without telling anybody.

I'm getting royalties on it.

And so the problem is, they get to the end and they're just like, okay, but the Germans have 9 millimeter Parabellum.

Can we do that?

And they're just like, yes.

No, but they're going to say yes.

Yeah.

So they did the exact same chambering, but when it came time to do the ammo, they're just like, powder back a little bit.

Let's dial it back a little bit.

What?

Bull.

Like, I mean.

And then you have this huge problem later on because of it, people not knowing what to Put and where and guns getting torn up and it's just like they don't blow up, but they just beat themselves to death.

Were people trying to do that with Villaprosis?

I want to say I've definitely seen a Villaper that was suffering from running 9mil Parabellum too often, especially because the loads have changed over time too.

That's the other thing is we have a friend with an MP18 that we used on the show and it's just like, yeah, you better put 124 grains in there because that's the closest you're going to get to the old truncated.

And even then it doesn't feed quite the same because they don't.

Nobody does truncated cone 9 millimeter anymore.

The shapes are different.

And it's kind of a hard thing because people are like, why don't you do ballistic shell tests?

I'm going because I can't get like the exact same dimension Malachor jacket with, you know, cordite powder that burns at a very specific weird rate.

So I'm going to give you a really bizarre approximation of what that cartridge can do, not the actual performance of that cartridge at that time.

So, yeah, I mean there's.

There's a ton of weird.

And I guess I blame you for this and I don't really blame you, but I, I bought, I walked in, I watched.

I walked into a gun shop and they had a husqvarna sitting there in 380 because why convert it?

Yeah.

And I was like, I know what that is.

I'm buying it right now because it's cheap.

And I know that when people start watching.

Oh, no.

Yeah, Nice.

Did you shoot?

Yes.

Oh, 380 shoots.

Fantastic.

That's good.

It's better at 380 than it does in the original cartridge.

It's like nine.

They call it nine Browning.

But it was just sort of like a long not.38 AC.

It's like a.

Somewhere between.

I don't know, it's another.

They call it 9 Browning.

It's another 9 by 20ish.

Vaguely similar.

This is a problem in that era you have all these nine millimeter cartridges and this is what people don't understand.

Wasn't it like semi rimmed too or something like that?

I remember now.

There's so many compare because you got like Largo and Browning and then like the Roth cartridges that are around at the time.

Yeah.

And then I mean like technically Largo is a Piper cartridge and then you have 38 ACP, 9 millimeter parabellum.

Steyer's doing their own 9 millimeter.

And really, like 9 millimeter parabellum tends to win out because of, a, how many guns were available from the German army?

But B, it is shorter cased, so therefore you can have a more favorable grip.

So Largo, I think, was sort of the last fighter in that category where Largo held out for a little bit because of Spanish endeavors.

But it's longer, so it makes.

So I could see how they would be the competitor.

Yeah.

Having a shorter length case in a gun that feeds through the.

The grip is kind of important for keeping those ergonomics clean.

Well, it just makes me laugh.

Like, I showed.

Showed somebody the my FN, and they're like, oh, it's just a Colt 19.

Oh, go.

No, it's not.

Yeah.

And they're like, who made it?

I'm like, husqvarna.

They're like, the chainsaw people.

I'm like, yes, I got a chainsaw to match it.

They made guns.

Yeah.

Were they gonna go with, like, the nail file checkering?

No, they were gonna do, like, the updated version that was available because they were doing it way late.

They were.

And they're like, no, this is great.

We like this.

And then, you know, the poor.

This whole fight.

And the poor guys are like, can we just.

Can we just buy this now?

And they're like, no, we don't make that anymore.

We're making this.

And they hand them, like, a.45 ACP and they go, oh, my God.

Because the entire argument In Norway up to that point was again 9 millimeter versus 45.

And so they finally settled on 9 millimeter and all this other stuff.

And they go, okay, can we buy it?

And they're like, no, we only have this in 45.

And they went, crap.

Because it started the whole problem over again.

Well, that case was closed.

But they were doing interesting things.

They were like.

They were shooting.

They came up with some contraption to shoot like a bucket full because they were worried about the.

You know, everybody talks about.

What is it?

Hydra crap.

My brain's locked out.

Hydrostatic shock.

Yeah, hydrostatic shock.

So they were.

They were kind of obsessed with the same thing.

So they were like shooting into buckets of water to see how much water splashed out, like to try to get an idea of how much displacement they were getting for velocity versus mass.

Like they were doing all sorts of weird experiments scientifically test.

But that's the whole problem.

Hydrostatic is like a really hard thing to look at.

What's big now is these like ballistic shell dummies with stuff in them.

So everybody's sort of always chasing the how do I do?

Sort of terminal performance without actually terminating anybody.

Because everybody gets mad when you start slaughtering livestock like we did during the pistol trial.

Somebody, the US was like, hey, 45 killed cows better.

We're gonna go with that.

Those trials are.

Don't read them.

Don't read them so bad.

It's just like, just shoot an animal once and they just count how many hours it takes for it to die.

I mean, it's just awful.

Oh, you had to read through them extensively for the worst.

Like, we get so much trouble.

They did it in Europe too, there.

All these terrible experiments in Europe.

It's just especially because in Europe they were trying to justify smaller calibers.

So they would just do terrible animal experiments and then be like, well, it died.

I think how many hours?

I think bowl still has the best animal experiments where they're just like, no, we just put it in the.

The bellies of all the animals and they all just passed it.

Oh, yeah.

We took on Ballistol as a sponsor because we were already using them.

Yeah.

And we were doing some old reading and it's like in their own literature and it's kind of poorly translated from German to English, so it's even funnier.

But their literature, they're talking about the non toxicity because balustol is derived from a medical oil, so it's extremely safe for human skin.

As a matter of fact, it is an antibiotic, essentially.

Yes, except they can't market it that way because it's not FDA approved in the US for that use.

They have a product that is.

But that's a separate thing because they don't want to go through it for every batch of what's supposed to be a gun oil.

But if you were out in the woods and you needed an antibiotic that is not.

It's mild, but it can be.

I may keep a can of ballastal in my bag just for that reason.

The wipes, really, the wipes are great.

The wipes are awesome too, because for not everybody.

For a lot of people, if you get like a bunch of mosquito bites and they're itching, the wipes tend to get the itching to go down a good bit.

But you're kind of oily, so.

But no talk about the animals.

Oh, I'm sorry.

So that was what I was thinking.

About this quote there.

Like, we, we.

We fed Ballistol to lab mice, but the way they said, it's like we filled the mouse's entire intestines with Ballistol.

And I'm like, how did you know that you filled its entire test?

But anyway, so that's like.

And then after it had some mild discomfort passing the Ballistol and you're like, was it an animal?

I don't understand what's going on.

But apparently like they filled a mouse, the live mouse, with Ballistol, and then the mouse passed all the Ballistol and it's like, other than seem to be uncomfortable, it was fine.

It lived a normal life.

And you're just like, okay, so you could just do that and you probably won't die.

Well, we were talking earlier.

There's the guy on YouTube who does a history of companies and how he was talking about Zeiss and Zeiss.

What do you make?

Oh, we make really nice optics in crystal.

And they're like, what did you do between 39 and 45?

And they're like, we don't have.

Zeiss removed that history from their website.

Oh, they believe that?

Yeah, about.

I mean, it's because nobody wants to be associated this association game, which I find really frustrating because I don't.

I don't really like forbidden knowledge.

Things happen.

You can talk about them.

Just because you don't have to agree with everything a government or a people are doing to understand that they invented a Volkswagen.

You know what I mean?

Like, that's where it came from.

If it's an efficiency that we can.

Then the idea that you should throw away all Knowledge gained from a bad situation means that you're ultimately wasting the sacrifices of other people.

Like, at least take something good away from it.

You know what I mean?

And World War II is the.

It was the oil for the German army.

As a matter of fact, the US almost adopted it, but World War I broke out while we were testing it.

But there's actually ordinance notes of Balustal being absolutely superior to everything we had available in the US at the time.

So US Ordinance was just about to try to purchase and arrange manufacture their own product, and then World War II starts heating up and they're like, oh.

And then we never really got Palistol.

So it was a good.

It is still a very, extremely good product because it's safe for human skin, all other stuff.

But one of my favorite things is sort of in the interwar period, it became sort of a panacea because it was derived from medical oil.

So there was a.

Again, a medically marketed version of Ballistol that people were taking for stomach issues.

And Hitler notoriously had stomach issues.

So he was consuming so much Ballistol that it was affecting his vision eventually because, I mean, too much of anything's bad.

Right.

Like, so he was consuming way too much Ballistol.

And so his doctor took him off the Ballistol because of the headaches or vision or whatever the issue was.

And then that caused his stomach cramps and pain to come back.

So, I mean, maybe if we just let Hitler keep his Ballistol, maybe things.

Well, he just needed it in smaller doses.

Yeah, I don't know.

All I'm saying is we took away Hitler's Ballistol.

The next thing you know, just don't.

Give him the whole bottle.

Give him half a bottle.

Why do we have to give him a whole bottle?

He's Hitler.

He's not gonna know how to take the whole bottle.

He thought he knew better than everybody, so he really did.

We were one gun loop away from just having Pete roll bottles.

Yeah.

So the other thing that we.

We see in history with, at least with gun technology, is the amount of copying or.

Or licensed copies or as in for the Spanish non licensed copies.

Well, sort of.

It was legal in their country.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

It's fine.

Some of my favorites are like World War II movies, all of them using stars.

Oh, yeah.

Because they're cheap.

The funnier thing is in the US There's a Lot of sort of war movies during World War I, like silent films or early sound or whatever.

And Charlie Chaplin is famously in one, which is even weirder to see.

Right?

But because of all the arms being sent to the front, the only thing that they could lay hands on that was a magazine repeater were crags.

So you have all these war movies in black and white where they're just running around with crags in the trenches.

And especially with Charlie Chaplin is even funnier because, like, what is going on?

And then you still see it.

I think Hogan's Heroes still had Craig Jorgensen's in the hands of, like, German prisoner of war camp guards.

And you're going, oh, my God.

And my favorite thing about the collector's world is people trying to justify that.

Like, well, Germans did capture some cracks and bullshit.

It's a.

It's a.

It's a TV show.

We really don't need to try to shoehorn this into being a reality.

Also, why would they go with that when it's not the ammo they were using then?

Well, to be fair, prison guard is a good use of people that don't need to shoot a lot of ammo, but it'd be more likely they have mosins or something.

Just sort of like, okay, just use some of this.

The other thing we've, we taught, we touched on Battlefield one, so I got to bring it up.

There's a lot of video games, especially World War II, World War I related, that have guns that weren't really used or were just concepts.

So we see, like, what was it?

The Italian submachine gun?

Yeah, the Villaprosa.

I mean, they were around.

And then the other one was the.

There's another one that they had in there, though.

They had a ton of stuff in there.

They had a bunch of weird prototype stuff there.

Battlefield 1 suffers from the fact that they.

They're trying to do like the Battlefield 3 formula, where it's like, okay, we got these classes.

The class comes with this kind of like, it has to have this fire rate with this distance, with this sort of power per round is the vague category that they've created for themselves.

So then when they look at World War I, they go, oh, that's not really how World War I was actually more in terms of small arms.

It was very symmetrical.

And then it became weirdly asymmetrical towards the end.

And there's not as much to pull on the axis side is what you'd want.

There's definitely not as much to pull from sort of the lower powers as you'd want.

It's only really the US and Germany that are doing super weird stuff.

Maybe a little France in there, a little bit of Britain, but you know, Italy's got some oddball that you can pick from, but it's not enough where you can go, okay, everyone's gonna get this submachine gun class.

You're like, there's literally one.

Like there's just one.

There's technically, there's technically like four submachine guns, but in terms of ever finding one on the front line, there's either this dual barrel, two man thing or there's this thing that Germany came out in the last couple months of the war, right?

And that's really about it.

I mean, yes, the OVP existed, but who the heck knows if you ever saw one.

Did Battlefield ever have more than one anti tank rifle in there other than the.

I think it's just the T gear.

Okay.

Which is.

Which is fair.

But they only needed one.

It was a special Class 2 in Battlefield 5.

I haven't played five at all, to be honest.

I played one just to try.

I played two minutes of it and then I decided that was enough.

Five kind of took it to a whole new level.

It's like everybody, the stuff that people complain about in Battlefield 1, they're like, oh yeah, we're gonna do it harder.

And then wasn't it five that one?

They're like, if you don't like it, don't buy it.

And then nobody bought it.

Oh yeah, that was funny.

Like, it's weird, but they want to treat history as a playground, which is great.

Just make it.

You know, just pretend the war kept going.

Then you can shovel anything you want in there.

But they want to play this game of like legitimacy and entertainment at the same time.

Well, legitimately, when I shoot in Battlefield 1, sometimes I shoot the whole cartridge, like case and all, all at once.

The artillery shells.

Oh my God, that was so funny.

I captured a screenshot of that way back in the day.

I just want to know who was running around with the clevery.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

I want to know who.

I really want to know who came up with the gun choices for that game.

Because the hell Regals were the most famous one, the Austrian belt fed submachine gun, because they included that game.

And when I saw it, I went, this is very surprising to me because I only knew about it because I manually went through an Italian archive of captured Austrian documents and that's where I first saw it.

And I still don't know what book or website or whatever referenced it.

That this guy, whoever was in charge of picking their designs, he came across it and it's been come across a bowl for a hundred years.

That's fine.

But where did he see it?

You kind of want to talk to.

Them literally go to the same Italian archive I did or did he.

Wasn't there one there where there was just one picture of somebody shooting the gun and they made a model out of it.

The Hell Regal.

There's essentially two pictures of the Hell Regal.

There's one of it sitting on a table with its drum sort of set aside.

So you could see that has sort of a chain link feed or a weird feedback.

I don't know that it's chain link.

I have to go back and look at it now, to be honest with you.

It's been a while.

It has a sort of weird belt system, but then there's a picture of a guy holding it.

So there's actually like one quarter of the gun we don't have any photos of, but you can kind of make some inferences.

But the problem is, looking at it, it's very hard to determine what the internals would actually be.

It seems to be sort of like a double return spring setup maybe, but we're not really sure.

But yeah, the Hellriegel was the one that they cloned out, which I thought was fascinating because I don't know if an ex didn't copy that gun.

We just have the photos of it existing in Austria at the time.

I'm sure it sucked.

Like the fact that we don't see it ever again probably means that it didn't work very well.

And looking at it, it looks very convoluted for what it's doing.

But.

Well, see what made me so I play a lot of Battlefield five.

Yeah, I know.

What made me really mad is they have an achievement.

They're like, oh, you have to kill so many enemies with ally powered weapons.

So I'm using a Jungle Carbine.

And they're like, oh, that doesn't count.

Why does it not go?

They're like, well, you can, you can use the mark, the mark 5.

But no, because it's a Jungle Carbine, it doesn't count.

I got so mad because I said I'm very confused.

You talk about that you can use like a number four Mark one.

Yes.

Because I haven't even played the game.

I actually don't know what guns are in five.

I stopped paying attention after battlefield.

There's a lot of like.

Like weird junk.

I mean just like.

Like they had an original.

They have a.

So the M.

The M2 is in there which was not widely used.

Right.

They have the.

An M1 carbine with a.

An old school original concept night vision scope.

Right.

They have a.

Jungle carbines in there.

They've got the Johnson in there which was not very.

Right.

Stolen from the Dutch.

Yeah.

And then they have.

They have like all these different.

Like there's a Japanese submachine gun that I even know about that's in there.

Other than it's not a Type 100 or whatever.

No, I think.

No, it wasn't the Type 100.

It looks kind of like a bullpup, but it's got like a.

The magazine is long.

I know.

Actually weirdly know which one you're talking about.

I can't remember the name of it now, but yeah, not really.

There's a lot of.

That's the thing.

They.

There's so much weaponry during World War II too.

But they.

They've picked out like the really like for some reason the rubies in it.

I'm like, why is.

I mean there were a bunch laying around, but why didn't just reskin it to be a unique.

Yeah, that would make more sense.

Yeah.

But it was just, just so many weird.

The only cool thing about it is that if you use an M1 grand in that game.

Right.

You reload too quickly.

Yeah.

You get Grantham.

Oh, do you?

Yeah.

I like that.

Okay.

But in theory it shouldn't really.

Well, yeah, I'd have to see the animation.

But it's.

It's every once in a while that if you reload too quickly, it.

You put in and then you hear your player start screaming, ow, ow, ow.

And I was like, what the heck is that?

And then I look down and his thumb is in the action and he's like trying to yank it out.

We haven't done the Garen yet, but I wonder how much like I wonder how much that was really happening.

Because when they're fresh, they're not supposed to do that.

They're supposed to actually lock open.

But then as they got older, they don't do.

I can put on some gloves and we could try it no, I'm not sticking.

Well, mine actually, weirdly, the one I have doesn't eat people.

It's pretty good about locking up.

Yeah, I remember I've shot that before.

Although the gas tube was messed up so.

Well, that's the other thing.

Like guns.

I wish somebody would bring back some retro World War II production guns.

The problem is we can't.

It's lost.

Technology is that way.

It really is the milling, the milling again, it's an economy of scale.

First of all, let's be fair to the people.

So everybody says they want, like, let's go, we'll go simpler, type 1A case.

Everybody wants a type 1Ak.

The Russians didn't want the type 1Ak because it was.

The whole point was to be this folded, mass produced, whatever.

And it turned out that what they were getting for what they were, the effort they were putting in wasn't worth it and they had to move over to milled, whatever, right?

And a lot of the stuff that we see in terms of, you know, think about Lee Enfields is extremely, painfully difficult to make a Lee Enfield the correct way.

Because when they tried to do it in Canada, they just gave up and went to the number four.

They went, you know, by the time, by the time we spin somebody up and have this sort of inherited knowledge of how to get this process done just right, we should pick a different gun.

And so you have the sort of simplified number four version of Lee Enfield.

It's the same problem.

Everybody's like, oh, Lugers are so expensive.

I want them to bring back the Luger.

Yeah.

Do you know how much that would cost to be more expensive?

We still have not hit peak Luger.

Like this is.

The funny thing is the talent, the knowledge pool and talent and the industrial capacity is diminishing, right?

At a rate higher than the cost rising on the originals.

Because to go back and have that reproduction made, it's going to cost you thousands of dollars to have a brand new one.

You could spend thousands of dollars on an original one.

It's actually got the history that's always the problem.

Know a lot of guys that have tried to do this.

I mean, I mean, I've been friends with guys that have tried reproductions and unless you can sort of build them with existing parts kits and you're only building part of the gun and the rest of it, stuff that you're making that you find, then you're kind of stuck, you know.

And any compromise you make on the design is going to infuriate the core people that Want to buy it anyway.

So when you try to make it in 9 millimeter instead of 30 carbine or whatever, some people are happy about that.

But you better have a low enough price point because no one's going to spend big money to have it not be exactly right.

Well, I'm just surprised nobody's done the.

The Garen yet.

And there's too many in the market.

Though I don't think we reached saturation.

No.

Because what's the Garen go for now?

I think nowhere near.

It would cost you more than that to make one because look at what's it cost for.

Look at dsa.

They do the foul.

Yeah.

DSA files are somewhere in that same price range at the low end.

It's going to cost you at least that much.

And especially the wood.

Nobody can do wood right anymore.

There's no, there's no old growth walnut available anymore.

Like, you know what the cost is on that wood now and then trying to make it.

And then also a lot of it's sort of the final hand fitting on the wood.

So your labor cost is going to be huge to do wood.

That's why nobody does it.

And then I got guys that do reproduction stocks.

Some of you might have noticed there's been reproduction Craig Jorgensen stocks finally available on like ebay and stuff like that.

That's a friend of mine that's actually been doing that project and he's still like trying to get it even better.

He's getting it closer and closer to original.

But they can't get good old dark American walnut.

You're gonna have to stain it to kind of look like that.

You're not gonna be able to have.

I mean, you can get American walnut, but it's not gonna be as tight of a grain pattern.

It's not gonna be, you know, because where you.

How do you get it at an economical price?

You know, Same issue I ran into.

But so I went.

I found the original lower stock.

Right.

I could not find the handguards.

Yeah.

And it's just.

And I, I'm like, I want to make this period correct there.

I had already cut off the ears.

So trying to find.

Find those to match is just a pain in the butt, you know?

Yeah.

We were talking about a.

I have a.

I've spent years putting back together Remington Model 10 trench coat.

And I got Very lucky to find the pieces for it.

But that has been years.

Oh yeah, it was.

And that's like, look, I have a part time job of just looking at auctions and stuff that go by with a very keen eye.

And so it's.

Most people can't commit those kind of hours, like I have had to do.

Right.

Well.

And that's, that's what, that's what I love about collecting because you find things that are sporterized and you want to bring them back, but you can't.

But then you find things that are in original condition.

And I started cleaning it up and somebody had lost the original front sight and just shoved a piece of brass.

And you know, I've got.

That's at least an easy repair.

Yeah, it's an easy repair, but I've got like, I've got two Carcanos.

I've tried to try to collect as much as I can because when you find them for a good price, that's when you, you jump on them.

But then like, even I bought a Arasaka type 99 and I'm like looking at the dates on it, trying to look it up.

I'm like, please don't be a last dish.

Please don't be a last ditch.

And I pulled it up and it's like, okay, so this happened.

This was first of the last ditch in 44 before they went to the last of the last.

Okay, it's still good.

And then trying to find ammo.

Yeah, at least you can make that a.30 06 though.

7.

7.

Yeah, 7.

7 is easier to make than some of the other cartridges, but you're going to have to make it.

Payloading is huge now actually, because of.

You think about it.

Manufacturing capacity has been deeply limited by the production of primers.

And so you only have so many primers.

I assume that regulation around opening a new primer facility is what's really killing it.

Because that is an explosive.

Explosive.

It's not like everything's a gunpowder, you know, and you're like, no, no, no, no.

Primers are sensitive.

That's the tap and boom.

So transporting, manufacturing all that stuff, that's the big.

That's gotta be crazy.

Yeah.

All right, I gotta, I gotta ask this question.

One, one from each view.

Okay.

Any gun that's not produced anymore, what would you bring back?

If money was not a cost, what would?

To the commercial market or for myself?

For yourself.

Myself.

I could just have it an original one.

Not original or none.

Just bring back and make it yours.

We know where one is now.

Wait, now we went.

And after we.

A week after the episode was in the bag, I got an email being like, hey, what's this?

Why?

I've spent three years looking for this and somebody asked me what it is a week after we make the episode.

That made me so mad.

It's okay.

We're going to go out there at some point.

Yeah.

And then for me personally, oh, it'd be so satisfying.

Also the really crazy rarity of all the guns anyway.

What's that?

Your one that got away.

One that got away.

Yeah, we, we.

We actually saw an auction.

We might have been able to bid on it, but then we had the land stuff come up and everything.

Yeah, I kind of want a tiger.

It made an impact in more ways than one, but it, it was.

It's because you're a little boy and it's the biggest gun.

It was the biggest gun.

It's the dumbest gun because it's literally just a car 98.

Someone just went control and just like stretched it out.

And then that's pretty much what they have.

But single shot action.

Yeah.

It's stupid and funny.

It was designed as a hedge.

They were trying to make an automatic version of a Maxim and they're like, well, if this takes too long, we need something in between.

It's just like, okay, just make a big Mauser.

They did.

They just made a big Mauser.

I don't know what yours would be off the top of my head.

Really?

No.

Because I'm thinking about it and it could be something.

It's probably a revolver.

There's definitely.

It's probably a revolver.

Oh, it is.

I can't.

I can't say what I'd actually want because then somebody else might find it.

But that's the problem when it gets down to, like, there's one or two known that are floating out there, but they're unknown.

It's one of those things, like, I know what it is.

There's a number of firearms I've found that nobody's looking for.

And then we do an episode and everybody's like, that was a thing.

And you're like, yeah, it turns out that was a thing.

And there's a few Little pieces that fall into the cracks that I'm looking for from very obscure countries that hopefully I'll just find them and I could have them.

But in the meantime, I will say what I would love to get my hands on is like a Fedorov optimat to actually shoot, because that is a very interesting.

It's the right crux of interesting, obscure, and yet really well known.

So it's hard to find.

There's only a couple of examples, as a matter of fact.

The one that supposed.

There's supposedly one in the US that was part of, I believe, the Aberdeen collection that has just gone missing.

In terms of all the curators I know, everybody that I've made contact with, no one knows where that gun went.

That's in grandpa's basement.

And yet it was known to be an inventory in the US at some point.

And I'm like, can I get my hands on that?

It's like.

Or Grandpa's bunker.

Nobody knows where it went.

So I'm probably gonna have to go to Russia to lay hands on one.

And I doubt that that's gonna happen anytime soon with the way things are.

And I'd love to shoot one just because it is sort of a first for a lot of things.

It also has extremely, extremely bizarre lock work.

There is.

If anybody wants to see it, There is a YouTube channel in Russian that just did a video with an author named Chumak.

Yeah, you did just.

Chumac is a wonderful writer on Russian firearms history because he doesn't.

It's all in Russian.

Reading about Russian firearms history has always been difficult because it's so politicized.

And this guy sort of cut through a lot of that, and he's actually gotten down to the.

The bare bones of why.

So after doing CNR channel for, like almost 10 years, I finally found a man who just recently wrote a book like a year ago on the mosins that actually explains why the mosin is the way it is.

Because I couldn't.

In English, there was no answer.

People would say stuff, but it was observational.

It wasn't causal.

You know, it wasn't like, here's the why.

It was just sort of, this is the what.

And so this guy finally gives me the why.

And I go, oh, my God, that makes so much more sense.

There's a man over in Russia that you love and he has no idea.

Yeah.

And I really hate to do this because I can't remember the exact name of the channel.

It's like either Hex Tactical or Hexagon Tactical.

It's, it's something like that, but it's a Russian channel.

I'll.

I apologize.

I'll just tell you later so that you can put in the notes or something.

But they do take a part of Fedorov in detail.

That's right.

And unfortunately it's all English.

It's in Russian, but you can put the subtitles to English and I'd love to get a hold of one to do a proper animation on it.

Proper teardown.

So make Bruno cry.

Actually, it wouldn't be that bad.

It's, it's, it's fairly sensible gun.

In, in some ways it just, it didn't last.

Yeah.

But now the next question that I've got for both of you is who, what gun inventor or what gun was made before its time and if it was made today, it would do well.

Oh, today, yeah.

If it was made to.

In general, today's technology though.