[ Mendoza Model 1934 ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at the
Royal Army Museum in Brussels, part of the
Belgian War Heritage Institute, taking a look at
some of their very interesting and unusual
firearms from their reference collection.
And today we have a Mexican Mendoza Model 1934 LMG.
Now this is one of relatively few domestic Mexican ... designed and production firearms.
People are probably familiar with the 1908 Mondragón rifles,
Mexico was one of the very first countries to formally adopt a self-loading infantry rifle.
Those weren't actually made in Mexico, they were made by SIG in Switzerland.
This was both designed and produced in Mexico, albeit a couple of decades later.
So Rafael Mendoza was really the predominant Mexican arms designer.
And he developed a number of guns, this one is probably the most successful,
the largest production, but it wasn't his only design.
He did this design work in 1929 through 1931.
It's interesting that Marcellus Thompson was actually brought in
when they started to manufacture these to help with the manufacturing process
and the tuning and final tweaking of the gun, interesting collaboration there.
At any rate, the Mexican army tested these guns from 1932 to about 1934.
And in 1934 it was formally accepted by the Mexican military.
Now, production took place at the Mexican National Arms Factory in Mexico City.
Unfortunately Mendoza himself kind of got screwed in this process.
He was not given licence to produce the guns, and he wasn't paid a royalty for them.
The only thing that he got out of the deal was that his company
was contracted to manufacture their magazines, so he did at least get something.
At any rate, there are a number of interesting design elements to this.
So let's take a closer look at exactly how it works.
Let's start by taking a look at some of the markings.
We have this very cool crest on the top of the receiver.
That is of course the Mexican eagle with a snake and cactus,
and marked Army National Arms Factory, Mexico.
On the back of the receiver we have a few more markings,
actually almost partially obscured by the stock.
But
The full designation for this is the C-1934.
Moving forward slightly we have the serial number, which this one is 3050.
And then up at the front of the receiver we have the manufacture date, which in this case is 1942.
And that serial number is also present on the barrel.
It is worth pointing out these guns do have a quick-change barrel mechanism,
and the barrel on this one is numbered 1.
So subsequent spare barrels would have been numbered 2, 3 etc.
One of the first interesting elements we'll take a look at is the magazine.
The Mendoza magazines are very similar to Madsen ... light machine gun magazines.
The difference being the Mendoza magazine is on the right side of the gun,
where the Madsen has the magazine on the left side.
It is worth pointing out that because the magazine is offset to the right side of the receiver,
the sights are able to be centred on the receiver.
This tube is actually the centre of the receiver,
this is an extra projection for the magazine well.
So despite having a top mounted magazine, the gun has centre-mounted sights.
This is also a design that does not have a magazine catch.
In order to remove the magazine what you actually do
is pull it backwards, and then lift it out nose first.
You can see the similarity to the Madsen magazine here,
it is a double stack, single feed, but there are no feed lips.
And ... the first cartridge is simply retained by this sheet metal clip,
and then fed sort of laterally into the gun.
Now we have magazine locking catches (sort of) on the front and the back,
and we have an over-travel stop here on the side.
I'll also point out this is labelled Mexican army,
And the procedure for putting this in is really totally foreign compared to most.
You lock it in the back first, like so.
And then the magazine can be pushed down into place.
And then to latch it you actually snap it forward slightly,
to engage the front locking catch in a notch in the front of the receiver.
And at that point the magazine is nice and solidly fixed in place.
So then you pull back, lift up to remove it.
While it's interesting, I don't think that is in any way a good system.
That is just begging for the magazines to not quite be firmly locked in place.
And this sheet metal tab seems like a very fragile element
that would be really easy to bend or break I'm sure.
Apparently these were originally issued
each gun with 70 magazines, which could mean a couple of things.
It could mean the magazines were fragile, it could mean that Mendoza was
just making the most of his contract to make magazines.
And convinced the Mexican government to buy an incredibly huge number of magazines.
There was a set of anti-aircraft sights made for the Mendoza, I have the front one here.
Unfortunately I don't have the rear, but I can at least show you what this looks like.
There's a little notch here and a screw peg to lock it in place.
And there's a little notch right in the barrel there,
so that locks in place there and screws in.
And there's what it looks like in place.
The bipod is a bit interesting, and frankly not one of the best elements of the design.
We have two bipod legs that simply lock, they're tight against the stock up here.
And then once you swing them down,
there is a little locking catch right there.
So when they are in the vertical position you can then lock the leg out,
which prevents it from pivoting.
You do that on both sides to put the bipod in place.
And then to hold it in place you actually have to use this crossbar.
You bring that into that little pin,
and then tighten the thumb screw down.
And that locks the bipod in place so that it doesn't collapse when you pick up the gun.
This is really not a particularly effective system.
It's nice and stable once it's set up, but it has no cant, no pivot.
... You've got no mobility on the bipod at all.
And frankly, that's a really finicky system to actually set up and take down.
Taking a look at the rear sight, we have the mounting point for the rear anti-aircraft sight.
And then our rear sight is an aperture.
And you can depress this spring-loaded button,
and that allows you to raise or lower the rear sight.
And there are range markings over on this side out to 1,400 metres.
The selector switch on the side is pretty typical.
It is safe in the forward position,
semi in the vertical position, and full-auto in the rearward position.
The gas system is adjustable, and you simply rotate this.
It's got really nice tangible visible clicks.
There are 8 positions that you can rotate to, and you'll notice here
we have a zero centre line and then positions to indicate one full revolution in and out.
So it's basically a micrometer-style gas adjustment system.
Put that back to normal.
And our last external control is the charging handle, which is up here.
Now I mentioned that this has a quick change barrel,
and the way you remove the barrel is with this locking lever.
So you pull this back, that unlocks the lever,
and you can then use the ... cam there to pull this wedge out.
Once the wedge is out ... you can simply slide the barrel out.
So you can see the slot here is where the barrel locking wedge goes in.
The bipod and the gas block are both on the barrel assembly.
Once the barrel is removed we leave the barrel locking latch open.
And to remove the bolt and the operating rod
we just pull the charging handle back to unlock the locking lug.
And then I can hold the locking lugs horizontal
since there's no barrel in place to force them to rotate,
and then that whole assembly just slides out the front of the receiver.
We then have the recoil spring assembly down here.
In order to get this out I need to depress the trigger,
and then I can pull that out as well.
The recoil spring is captive. This ... sits against a hole in the back of the receiver.
There's space for the rod to reciprocate inside.
So when it's in the gun the recoil spring sits inside the op rod.
And there is space for this to reciprocate back into the stock inside the receiver,
and this washer holds it in place, so
that's what's happening when the action cycles.
We have a hollow head to the gas piston here which sits over
the gas ... valve on the barrel assembly, like that.
And then the bolt is a rotating bolt, we have like shades of Lewis gun or later M60 here.
This fires from an open bolt, and in the fired position it's like this.
Once it fires there's actually a fairly long travel for ... the bullet to travel and pressure to drop.
Until as the gas piston goes backwards (it is attached to this fin),
and that fin is going to hit this cam section in the bolt and force it to rotate, right there.
And it's just that much rotation to unlock
the locking lugs, and then the whole thing can travel back.
You can see we've got 8 locking lugs here: 3 in the back, 3 in the middle and 2 at the front.
And I can in this position just pull the bolt right off.
One of the interesting elements of the Mendoza is that it has a dual-ended firing pin.
So if one end of the firing pin breaks, you can just flip it around and use the other.
The way this works is that the firing pin is essentially fixed to the op rod.
So when the op rod goes all the way forward
the firing pin is going to protrude out of the bolt face and fire.
This also ensures that the gun can't fire if the bolt's not fully locked into battery.
Because ... this has to be in the locked position
in order for the firing pin to be far enough forward to protrude and fire.
There's our sear notch on the bottom where the trigger mechanism
is going to hold it open when not actively firing.
If we look inside the magazine well here on the receiver you can see the locking surfaces.
There's the one for the front lug, there's the middle lug,
and right back there is where the rear lug locks into place.
And then there are matching locking surfaces in this top strap of the receiver,
you can see the middle one there.
And in the bottom, right there.
One other interesting mechanical aspect of the Mendoza is the ejector,
which is kind of like the Nambu light machine gun ejectors
in that it is mechanically activated by the bolt.
When the bolt hits the end of travel, right there,
as you can see ... there's a mechanical linkage that kicks the ejector over.
And you can see it right there, when the bolt goes all the way back
right there, it's going to kick cases out.
And there's the whole thing field stripped apart.
It's really a fairly simple, effective, reliable machine gun.
A little bit of a complicated receiver to manufacture,
but compared to some of the other things that were out there at this time period, not bad at all.
The handling is pretty decent.
I haven't had a chance to shoot one of these, but the gun balances nicely.
I wish it had a little bit of ... flexibility on the bipod, but it's at least a pretty stable bipod.
And I suspect it would be a very pleasant gun to shoot, especially in 7mm Mauser.
Even though the gun was adopted in 1934,
it would take about 5 years to actually get production running.
And these guns went into production actually in 1939.
And then production ran into the early 1950s with, like I said, a total of about 5,000 made.
... The primary purchaser was the Mexican military,
but there were also efforts to export the guns, to sell them around to other people.
The Philippines were actually interested in purchasing these,
although the outbreak of World War Two
kind of ended that deal prematurely and they didn't end up buying any.
There was also interest from Guatemala, who bought a small number from Costa Rica.
A decent number were actually sold to Cuba, about 50 guns were sold to Cuba in 1950 or '51.
And then of particular historical note,
Fidel Castro's expedition from Veracruz in 1956 had a dozen Mendoza LMGs.
These guns would continue to see use with the Mexican military for a ... couple of decades.
But after World War Two they ceased to be a primary weapon.
The Mexican military would transition after World War Two from 7mm Mauser to .30-06,
largely because of the availability of
huge amounts of cheap American surplus war materiel with the end of World War Two.
So the 1934 Mendozas would be replaced
in front line service by guns like BARs and .30 calibre Browning 1919s.
There was a follow-up Mendoza light machine gun design, designated the RM-2.
You'll see ... some documentation on that,
but it never really made it past prototype stage, or very limited production.
It never saw the service use that the 1934 pattern did.
I should say, I am very much in debt of Luis Eduardo Gonzalez,
who is a Mexican author who wrote a full book on Mendoza automatic weapons.
And he has actually gone ahead and translated that from its original Spanish into English,
and has it available on Amazon as an e-book in both English and Spanish.
So if you're interested in more about Mendoza,
some more detailed information about the 1934 gun in specific
or some of Mendoza's other designs, I would highly encourage you to check out that e-book.
I have a link to it down in the description text.
And of course a big thanks to the Belgian Army Museum for giving me the opportunity
to pull this one out of their reference collection to show to you guys.
In addition to that reference collection, they have a really fantastic
extensive display of everything from uniforms and small arms
to vehicles and heavy artillery at their museum in the centre of Brussels.
So if you ever have the chance to visit the city,
I would highly recommend taking some time to check out the museum.
Hopefully you enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.
Thanks for watching.