Any ideas on thus serial confoguration?

[Boris Badinov]

Odd serial that popped on calguns:



70       0229       600##30    P

Import stamp:
    “SKS 7.62x39 made in China by Notinco KSI pomona CA”

Features: 2 piece has tube. Spike bayo. Stamped Trigger guard. No bolt or bayo lug machining cuts. Do not know if it has all matching serials.


I'm thinking possibly:  1970. Arsenal 0229 [(possibly the same as /229\ ?)  ?

No idea about the 7 digit serial that follows.

[Justin Hell]

I have a 0226 stamped similarly...sans the date, the five digit serial starts with 72.  The number fonts are different in size and type though...and it's a Davidson's import.  It doesn't appear to be scrubbed. I kinda am working the theory of it being a 72 from a very low output outfit...or an early 70sish from a moderate output outfit.

I haven't seen more than one or two others including this one that utilize standard numbers instead of the normal factory stamps used by these arsenals/assembly plants. Mine came to me as a barreled receiver, so all I have to work on for components to identify era is that it had a very shoddy FSB, or it had a bayo handle specific to the factory that didn't droop. It has a cast bulbous type gas block and the original sight leaf was the pinned type with the 3...unfortunately, that is also gone, as I didn't know about that type of leaf, and in my ignorance...let's just say they are now 1 rarer.

It makes you wonder if some of these era guns were 'last ditch' in the sense that random parts were being used up to cobble together guns that weren't in 'production' in any major sense at the time.  Utilizing out of spec parts and assembling functional units that were going straight to the cosmo vats for an indefinite period of mothballing, only to surface here decades later.

Then again, the serials could mean nothing and these could have just been hastily assembled and stamped from blanks before export. That 70 separated from everything else would make you think date rather than lot number though.