Haven't posted in awhile... or bought many guns for that matter, as we're doing some pricey renovations at home.
Picked this up in an auction a few months back... another Mannlicher carbine, this a quite rare M90 Cavalry carbine. This was the predecessor of the M95 - very few mechanical differences, but note the quadrant sight and lack of handguard and lower barrel band. This one is missing the front band as well, which is going to be a pain to fix as it's a rare gun, and has had the bottom of the stock sanded, but it wasn't very expensive for a very rare gun. These were adopted by the Austro-Hungarians specifically as carbines in response to the weaknesses of the M88 rifles, and were so successful with a couple of refinements replaced the M88s entirely as the M95. This one was made in 1892, served through WW1 and escaped all the postwar rebuilds because it was given to Italy as war reparations, and issued to their colonial forces in East Africa.
This next one is more common, and probably more interesting for most of you! A late-WW2 Browning Hi Power, made at FN under German occupation and used by the German military (if you look really close you can see the German proofs above the trigger) - these were ostensibly mainly used by the Fallschrimjager and Waffen SS, although there's no specific markings on them to prove that.
This one was almost certainly a Vet bring-back (which was a lot less common in Canada than that States given our restrictive handgun laws), as it was recently found in an attic in Vancouver by a friend of a friend. He almost tossed it into the ocean, but thankfully it found its way to me instead! It certainly looks like it spent 60 years in an attic, but aside from the pitting the finish is actually quite good (by 1944 they were pretty roughly finished to begin with) and the internals are great - the bore looks like it's barely been fired. Certainly not the nicest gun in my collection but you have to love the story!
Just for fun, a Canadian Inglis and German FN, both 1944ish, that could very well have been used on opposite sides of Market Garden and the liberation of the Netherlands!
