Bought some new guns

[Nyles]

Picked up a couple of guns this month that, believe it or not, I've been looking for since 2009. They're both WW1 French issue "Spanish 92" revolvers, from when the French were desperately short of handguns and bought anything they could in 8 x 27mm M1892 from the Eibar gun trade.

The first is one of the best, a Trocaola S&W M&P knock-off. It's actually mechanically closer to a Colt on the inside, and has a couple clever improvements over a real S&W - a much wider rear sight notch than found on contemporary Smiths, better suited to combat shooting, and a wide hammer spur for the same. It's obviously not a S&W in terms of fine workmanship or materials but is still quite decently made, enough so that I wouldn't feel terribly badly armed with it.




The second is one of, and probably the, worst. It's marked "mle 1915" (modele 1915) and is obviously a knock-off of a Pieper revolver, but quite badly made and there's no record of by whom. It's covered in rough hand-cut tool marks and has just an awful trigger, and requires a bit of fiddling to open. The French didn't buy many of these and passed apparently passed them on to the Romanians as soon as they had anything else on hand to use instead.



Any of these French WW1 Spanish 92 revolvers are very hard to find in Canada - I got a screaming deal on the Trocaola in an auction and probably overpaid for the Mle 1915 from a dealer, but I figure together they balance out.

I also picked up a couple of bayonets from a local antiques store, the first of which was a rather large and impressive Portuguese M1885 yatagan sword bayonet for my Kropatschek (note how its side-mounted):



The other, though missing the scabbard, is a super-rare Finnish M27 made by Fiskars (they probably made your scissors). You won't find many Finnish Mosin-Nagant bayonets as Finn soldiers apparently preferred to fight with their hunting knives and often ditched their bayonets. Oddly this doesn't fit on my Finn M27, I'm not sure why.