Welcome to The Armourer’s Bench and thanks for taking the time to read this. We’re very excited to launch this new project looking at the history of the most interesting small arms we can find!

For Vic and myself, TAB is a labour of love. We love history and we love firearms. We’ve both long been working in the field, and if you’re interested, you can read a little more about our backgrounds here.

We are eager to bring you the history, technical detail and stories behind these guns so we will be bringing you in-depth videos profiling individual weapons, videos looking at the evolution of weapons and also discussion videos where we delve a little deeper into the history. Vic has a wealth of experience and anecdotes from his time as an armourer and will be looking for any excuse to share those too!

TAB will bring you videos, blogs and hi-res photos to tell the whole story of the weapons. Where possible each video will have an accompanying blog post going into even more detail about the weapons and also sharing contemporary video, photos and the research sources we have used. As a historian I’m eager to enable those who want to, to dig deeper into the stories of the weapons we cover and the best way to do that is share where we found our information.

Now you’ll appreciate we’re new to this and the learning curve has already been steep! A lot goes into a project like this, more than even we expected! We’ve had to learn fast. I’ve spent a lot of time setting up the back-end of our site and various social media channels and Vic has been hard at work perfecting his video editing skills.
Our presentation skills might feel a little clunky at first – we might not be looking at the camera at the right times and we might struggle to get things in frame (especially with a certain cavalry carbine we have coming up). But we’re quick learners and I know you guys will be patient with us as we work on becoming as slick as our esteemed colleagues on other channels. We also welcome input from you guys, our viewers and readers, so if you have more information on something or even some helpful constructive criticism we’re happy to hear it.

We are currently in contact with a number of collections and museums and are excited to work with new partners to film the content that we think you guys will enjoy and that we ourselves really want to watch!

It’s early days for us but we hope you’ll enjoy this project as much as we have enjoyed making it so far. So don’t forget to bookmark armourersbench.com and subscribe over on Youtube, and we also have a facebook page which we’ll keep updated. We hope to be posting weekly videos and alongside that frequent blog posts and as much content as we can create!

Thanks,
Matt