Introduction to the most important rifle you never heard of.

Welcome to mondragonrifle.com, the website dedicated to the first self-loading battle rifle to be issued to a standing military organization,  the  Mexican Army in 1911.

The two patented Mondragon rifle designs you will be introduced to, are the “breech loading  manual bolt action rifle” and the  gas powered “self-loading rifle”. These were designed by an officer of the Mexican army, Manuel Mondragon. The rifle itself was invented during that period known as ‘The Mexican Revolution”.  This would be the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s.

Like the rifles themselves the information available about the Mondragon rifle is extremely scarce. The Mexican Revolution, a factory fire in the Swiss factory at SIG, the resulting chaos after World War 1 and the fact no one wanted a SLR until WW2 has relegated this technology to the history books.  There is a lot of misinformation about the Mondragon rifle.   We aim to fix that!

The surviving facts laid out on this site are based on the original patents, other collectors, authors and the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of Mondragon rifles as shown below.

Here you will see surviving telegrams and letters between the SIG factory  and the Mexican government. The best and most accurate information comes from disassembling  the actual rifle,  which I luckily I have access to!

Some other  information  I have found over the years comes from articles and books, and credit will be given to those authors.

I am not a writer, just a collector whose hobby has gotten the best of him, so if I write something confusing… please let me know and I’ll try to reword the offending sentence! Any questions, comments or snide remarks are  welcome!

Special thanks to Mr. Luis Gonzalez, of Mexico, who has provided invaluable pictures, historical documents and insight from south of the border.

If you wish to contact me directly, use vmias@aol.com and make sure you use the word “Mondragon” in the subject otherwise my spam filter will take care of it.

NOTE: This site is in its infancy and not all the information has been posted.   

 I am in a rush to get it started!