User Created Animations Not Working With Mecanim

Hello,

So I am making a Zombie Survival Game. All I have right now is a player (capsule) with movement script, mouselook script, and an inventory script to pick up items and equip them. I also have an axe and m9 weapons to be picked up. You can walk over to the items and them pick them up, they go into the inventory, and you can equip them and then they are on screen and such.

So I wanted to add animations to the arms that hold the axe. I got the arms from this youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUQuHf8M9XQ&list=PLPV2KyIb3jR7F_B4p8X3YwHPaExh0R9Kk∈dex=29. They come with a few ready made animations that you can use and they work fine in the mecanim when I put them in. What I want to do it make my own animations so I can have shooting, reloading, and such. Instead I choose not to import the animations and I make my own. I go into the animations tab, make the animation for the arms and they work. At first I used scripting i.e. animation.Play("slash");. That all worked well but there is a lot of bugs and I want to use mecanim because it is much better. So I put an idle animation in mecanim as the default, so it should play right off the bat, and it doesn't work. When I put the animator tab under the game to see if it is working it has the little bar running under the default animation saying that it is playing but nothing is happening.

I don't know if it is the animations that I am making or if it is the arms because my user creates animations are not working in the Mecanim. Please Help!!!!!

Thanks in advance