Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, I am here at the Rock Island
Auction House taking a look at some of the guns
that are coming up for sale
in their May of 2017 Premier Auction.
And this is a really unusual
submachine gun to find in the United States.
This is a Mekanika Uru.
Uru being the name of a tropical rainforest bird in Brazil.
And this is a Brazilian manufactured submachine gun.
They are quite rare in the United States as I said, they only made about 10,000 of these.
They were manufactured from '77 to 1985.
Development began in 1974, the designer was a guy named Olympio Vieira de Mello.
(Or something like that, my Portuguese is non-existent.)
And ... what makes this really interesting to me is not so much the outside, but rather the inside.
This ... was designed from the ground up to be a very cost-effective,
simple, and efficient submachine gun.
And it really kind of actually does that really well.
So why don't we go straight to disassembly.
This thing has only 17 parts, and no pins, and no screws.
How does that work? Let's find out.
The rate of fire that the designer chose for the Uru is about 750 rounds per minute.
I think that's a little fast, but it's certainly not uncommon.
It is chambered for standard 9mm Parabellum, it uses a 30 round magazine.
Following in the idea of minimising the number of pins and screws and whatnot,
the magazine catch is a flat leaf spring.
So you grab this and pull it backwards, and you can slide the magazine out.
30 rounds. It is a single-feed position magazine,
meaning that the two stacks of cartridges in the mag taper to a single one at the top.
That's a little easier to design the gun around
because it means you only have one position where cartridges will ever feed from,
instead of having to design the gun to feed from two, left and right.
However these are less reliable in general,
and a little harder to load magazines for, the single-feed designs.
Now disassembly, we'll start with the buttstock.
We have a little spring-loaded detent here, push it in, rotate, and the stock comes off.
This does leave a gun which can be fired
in a two-handed grip like this very easily, if that's what you want to do.
I will point out these were actually adopted by both the Brazilian Army,
and a number of Brazilian police forces, state and local police forces.
So they did see official government use.
And while we're here, there are the markings.
That pretty much covers everything, it's all right on the side there.
Manufacturer Uru, 9mm, Mekanika was the company that designed them.
There you go, made in Brazil.
Now moving on with disassembly, we're going to take the barrel out.
It is simply threaded, so a little spring detent to keep it from falling out.
That's un-threaded, that all comes out.
With the barrel now out, we can separate the upper from the lower receivers.
You'll notice on this receiver tube
we have a pair of flat steel plates that have been welded into place.
These contain the sights, so there's our rear sight aperture, and also the sling swivels.
There's the rear sling swivel, ... there's the front one.
That thing doesn't even count as a front sight blade,
it's more like a front sight nubbin, but that's what it's there for.
And then each of those plates also has a hole in it. The rear one has a detent,
the front one has a solid peg coming out.
And to separate the upper from the lower,
you just push this detent in, and pull the lower down off.
You'd normally do that probably with a cartridge,
I'm going to do it with a little punch because it's what I've got available.
There is our fire control group, magazine well, and general lower assembly.
This now contains the bolt and recoil spring assembly.
I can pull the bolt handle out once the bolt is forward in the ejection port here.
And then all the other bits come out as well.
So we have our bolt, we have a recoil buffer pad here.
This is not in the greatest shape, you'd want to replace that if you're going to shoot it.
And a captive recoil spring.
The bolt is very simple, fixed firing pin.
Basically the only moving part you've got in there is the extractor.
Also we just have cutouts for the sear and the ejector.
And then this circular cutout is where the recoil spring sits.
It has that lozenge-shaped retaining plate at the front, so it sits right there,
and then compresses like so when the bolt travels.
And looking inside the fire control group, these are really simple.
So this guy right here sort of is a pin, but it's more of a dowel, certainly not a roll pin.
And the trigger actually doesn't really pivot, so much as it slides on that round piece.
And the trigger spring is right down there,
and it is actually just a flat spring that the trigger is bending down.
We have a safety on this side: that's automatic, that's semi-automatic, and that is safe.
And what that is doing is rotating this bar.
So in safe you'll see there's no cutout, so the trigger can't come ... far back.
Which means it can't come far enough back to release the sear.
Semi-auto allows the trigger and sear to come back,
but you can see they're cut out on the bottom there,
and the trigger can't come far enough back or far enough up to fully release and not catch.
So what happens here is this will allow the bolt to drop,
but it will catch on each shot.
And what happens there is when the trigger is all the way pulled back,
it catches on this rear sear engagement surface.
When you let go of the trigger this comes up slightly,
the bolt will drop from this sear engagement to that one,
and catch there, and that's ... your functional disconnector.
Then on full-auto this is held down far enough
that the rear engagement surface never connects (or one of the two never connects),
so the bolt simply continues cycling back and forth and firing, as long as you hold the trigger down.
Really pretty clever, simple, cheap, a lot of things submachine guns are supposed to be.
It's ... basically a stamped-steel ejector right there.
The magazine well is a couple of layers that are ... spot welded together I presume.
Yeah, you can see the spot welds right there.
And then lastly we have this component sitting back here.
This pivots on the selector bar rod,
and it's just got a little weak thin spring back here.
It moves back and forth, and doesn't appear to do anything.
This is a drop safety. So what happens is
if the ... bolt is forward and it's dropped on the rear end of the gun,
you'll get inertia that will cause the bolt to cycle backwards.
And the safety issue with submachine guns is that if the bolt comes back just far enough
to clear the magazine and pick up a cartridge,
but not far enough to catch on the sear,
it will then take that cartridge, go forward,
and because it has a fixed firing pin, fire as soon as it closes.
That's an inadvertent accidental discharge with a submachine gun, and it's a dangerous condition.
So what they have here is this piece which is much lighter than the bolt,
and under much less spring tension.
So if you drop the gun ... on the rear end, this will compress backwards which lifts it up.
And it does that faster than the bolt will move,
because the bolt is much heavier and slower to accelerate.
So that when you drop the gun, by the time the bolt moves back
this will have slammed backwards, the bolt will hit that solid surface right there.
And will be unable to move far enough to pick up a cartridge.
That is a really clever little drop safety.
Alright, there you have one field stripped Uru Brazilian military and police submachine gun.
A really interesting exercise in simplicity of manufacture and design.
So a few years ago parts kits showed up for the Urus.
This is the first time I've actually seen a complete one.
I don't know how many are on the registry here in the US, but it's not very many.
It is certainly cool to find a transferable one. If you're into unusual submachine guns,
this one kind of fits the bill in a way you wouldn't expect just from looking at it on the outside.
So if you're interested in having it yourself
(as long as you can pass the NFA background check),
take a look at the description text below.
You'll find a link there to Rock Island's catalogue page on this guy.
You can check out their pictures and description,
place a bid online, or come here and participate live in the auction, or bid by phone.
Thanks for watching.