[ Model 1894 Mondragón Bolt Action Rifle ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video episode on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian, I am here today at the Rock Island Auction House taking a look
at some of the guns that are up for sale in their upcoming April of 2015 Premier Auction.
I found this one down on the rifle racks, and it definitely
jumped out at me as one we needed to take a look at.
You may have heard of Manuel Mondragón, he was the Mexican arms designer
who is best known for developing the Model of 1908 Mondragón rifle.
Which is commonly seen to be the first semi-auto rifle adopted by a national military.
The Mexican army actually adopted this semi-auto rifle in 1908,
... nearly 30 years before the US adopted the M1 Garand.
Now they only adopted a couple of thousand of them, and they ended up
having a lot of trouble with ammunition supply and didn't use them very effectively.
But nevertheless they were still there.
Well, what a lot of people don't realise is that Manuel Mondragón designed
quite a number of other firearms, both small arms, rifles like this one, and also artillery pieces.
He worked closely with SIG in Neuhausen, Switzerland.
They did the manufacturing on the 1908 Mondragóns,
and they also did the manufacturing on this, one of his earlier designs.
Now, as you can probably tell by the gigantic bolt handle,
this is bolt action, it is not semi-auto.
But it's interesting in that it has a three position selector switch
for safe, regular fire, and automatic fire.
So if that intrigues you, then why don't we bring the camera back here
and let's take a closer look at what this is and how it works.
Alright, I want to start by making a few initial points here.
First off, from the muzzle end of the rifle you can really kind of, if you squint,
see the Swiss origins of this, being manufactured by SIG in Neuhausen.
It just kind of looks Swiss there.
The other interesting thing, as we look down the length of the rifle,
you'll see this front sling swivel is screwed straight into the wood here,
there are in fact no barrel bands anywhere on this.
And there's no separation for a top and a bottom handguard.
As it turns out, this entire front piece of furniture
is one hollow barrel shroud made out of wood, which is very unusual.
It probably would have been far too fragile to use in the field, frankly.
In order to take it off (I'm not going to do that
because I don't want to risk damaging anything or cracking it),
but what you would do is remove this screw,
which holds the barrel band/sleeve/bayonet lug assembly into the wood.
You would then pull out this screw.
This one, I would expect, goes through a semi-circular slot in the barrel
and simply guarantees that the front band here with the ... front sight
is lined up perfectly square on the barrel.
You don't want to reassemble this and discover that you've got the front sight canted,
like it was something made by Century.
So, now that we've taken a look at that, let's go a little further back.
One thing that you'll notice, if you look around on the internet,
you'll see that there are some other Model 1894 Mondragón rifles.
And most of the other ones you see have the beer keg style of very Swiss-looking bolt handle.
Where it's a centre flat band that has a Bakelite or a wood knob on the top and the bottom.
This one is a bit unique in having a solid round steel bolt handle.
This is also serial number 1, which we can see on a number of the parts.
For example, the bolt lug here is marked.
The rear sight leaf is marked underneath, and it's on a couple of other parts.
This is definitely a very early production, probably a prototype.
But despite that it works well, and it's a remarkably simple and effective rifle.
So we have two sets of locking lugs. Each one has five lugs in total,
five at the front, five at the back.
And there are five matching locking recesses,
both under here at the back of the receiver and under here at the front.
We have a camming slot in the bolt, which you can see right there.
That acts in conjunction with a lug on this bolt handle
to force the bolt to rotate as the handle goes forward.
So you can actually see the lug come into its locking recess right there.
Rotates down and out, and then it rotates up and into place, right there.
In order to take the bolt out, what we do is actually take this little knurled knob.
By pulling this in, I allow the bolt to disconnect from the handle.
And then, ... once we do that,
we can have the bolt lugs line up with this rear set of lugs so they can come out.
I pull the trigger to drop down the [sear].
And the whole assembly ...
comes out the back of the gun.
So this is our bolt assembly.
You can see the lug, right here, which is what interfaces with this cam right there.
This way as the handle goes back and forth, it forces the bolt to rotate.
The bolt itself is very remarkably simple.
In fact, ... as I was going through this rifle I was surprised at pretty much every turn
by how simple it is, given what an early design it is.
So, the rear end cap here just screws off.
Our striker is at rest, so there's basically no spring tension.
You don't risk this flying across the room.
This piece is a little bit greasy but we'll take a look at it here.
This is our firing pin, and also our striker assembly.
So there's your firing pin spring.
This gets pulled back, pulled back, pulled back,
and when you pull the trigger, it releases it,
drives the firing pin forward, fires the gun, very simple.
The bolt, there we go.
You can see the set of five locking lugs on the back, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Here on the front, ... this isn't really a locking lug, it's angled down, but it kind of looks like one.
Extractor. And this whole ... component is hollow inside, so really quite simple.
A little bit complicated to machine ... the locking lugs, but ... all in all, not bad.
Now while we still have the bolt out, I want to discuss this thing.
This is the fire selector switch.
And it's got three positions, which are marked "A", "L" and "R".
L is semi-automatic, or regular firing.
You can see we have a sear there, when I pull the trigger it drops down.
That allows the striker to snap forward and the gun to fire.
When I switch to R, you'll notice that the [sear] is pulled down,
the trigger is forced to its rearward position.
What this does is frankly disable the trigger,
as if you are holding the trigger down constantly.
This is what allows the gun to fire in so called "automatic" mode.
What happens is every time you fully close the bolt the gun fires.
So you can fire very quickly by simply racking the bolt back and forth.
Kind of like holding down the trigger and slam firing a Winchester 1897 shotgun.
This was deliberately designed into this gun
as a way to give infantry troops more firepower on the advance.
You would presumably probably do this from the hip,
and you would presumably probably not hit anything in the process,
but it would make a lot of suppressing fire.
The last position, marked "A" over here, is safe.
In this position the sear is up and engaged
and it's locked there, and we can't move the trigger.
So now that you see what this selector does with that sear
let me go ahead and put the bolt back in.
We can push the bolt in, ... well, you can't see it from this angle,
but the lugs are not lined up with the recesses.
So I use this switch again to allow the bolt to come out of engagement. There we go.
What you don't necessarily notice when you look at this is that the lugs
(you can see it here when you're paying attention and trying to see it),
the lugs on the front are actually exactly out of sync with the lugs in the rear.
That prevents you from pulling the bolt out the back ...
on each stroke of the bolt.
In order to actually disassemble it, you have to rotate the bolt
... the amount of one locking lug, once you have it at the back here.
Now, ... when we get to the spring engagement right here, this is a cock on closing bolt.
Once it's cocked ... the lugs are in battery, and now the striker is ready to fire.
So the striker goes forward, cycle the gun and we're ready to fire again.
When we put it into automatic, ...
(which is this one, forward),
now it fires, it's fired, it's fired, and so on.
The magazine here has a spring-loaded follower.
You'll notice that you can see through it.
It has an opening on the bottom because it actually uses an en bloc clip
that looks very reminiscent of the M1 Garand's clip.
So when you fire the last round, or actually most likely when you chamber the last round,
the clip falls out the bottom of the rifle.
Now should you want to eject it sooner, we have this lever here which acts as a clip release.
Now I'm not entirely sure of the capacity of this clip.
However, I have some .45 Auto cartridges which have the same case head as .30-06.
This rifle is chambered for a 6.5mm cartridge, and I'm honestly not sure exactly which one.
But most of those cartridges are pretty similar in case head size,
so I'm going to use these .45 Autos as a stand-in for a rifle cartridge.
And you can see that 6 of them fit very nicely, just like in an M1.
There's a little bit of tension in the clip holding that last one in place.
This leads me to believe that this is almost certainly a 6 round capacity clip.
So if you are going to be shooting the gun, you would take your clip
of presumably 6.5, load it in here, press down.
Obviously this isn't going to work because they are totally the wrong cartridges. .
But clip it into place, there is a catch that locks onto
this little cutout on the back of the clip, and that holds it in place.
You fire your 6 rounds, on the last one the clip falls out the bottom and you can reload it.
I expect this would have been a very fast and efficient rifle to shoot.
I think the "automatic" feature is kind of pointless.
It's an interesting idea, but I don't think it would have any actual practical use.
But a fascinating design from a little-known gun designer.
Well, thanks for tuning in guys, I hope you enjoyed the video.
We certainly don't get to see an early Mondragón bolt action like this,
certainly not serial number 1, very often. So I'm glad we had the chance to.
If you'd like to add this to your own collection of bolt-action rifles, and who wouldn't,
you have the opportunity in ... April of 2015.
Go ahead and click the link in the description text below,
and that will take you to Rock Island's catalogue page on the gun.
You can see their high-res pictures, their cataloguer's description,
some information on where the seller got this gun originally.
And everything you need there is at your fingertips to create an account online,
place a bid, or come here in person to participate in the auction.
So, thanks for watching.