Everybody has a favorite SKS in their collection, whether it's a $3000 safe queen or a $150 gunsmith special that's been brought back to life and you shoot every weekend. It might be the sweetest shooter you've ever had or maybe it has an amazingly tiger grained stock. It might be a super tacticool'd jobber that's set up just right for your frame so you can shoot all day or it's simply an uncommon SKS that you don't see too many of.
So everyone knows I've got trashy guns, and as expected, here's mine: a very modest recent import. This is a 2 million series Sino-banian I got towards the end of 2012. Prior to this, I had gotten my last SKS (a Yugo M59) way back in 2004. This gun was my first Chinese SKS, believe it or not, and helped get me interested in Chinese SKSs in general. It also pushed me to look for clues about it and really was a big part of the impetus to start researching things on my own because it was clear much of the information out there is pure speculation by 'experts' with huge collections & webpages, or is simply commonly accepted assumptions repeated ad nauseam that are just flat-out wrong. I was actually really disappointed when I opened the box for the first time. It looked like this:
No bluing anywhere. Totally mismatched stock w/o a S/N (two trapdoors in the buttplate...I didn't know what that meant at the time), and a replacement gas tube. Right off the bat I had a problem, when I took the gas tube off to check the piston number (mismatching too), I couldn't get it back on, the fit was simply too tight to rotate the cam back to closed. I actually half considered sending it back, but then I'd be out $30 for shipping and wouldn't have a new SKS, regardless of how crappy it was. So I hit the top of the tube where the latch goes with a small riffler file and got it to seat very nicely. It's a very tight handguard, no play in it at all when it's on the gun.
So I cleaned it up and it really started to grow on me.
I took it out for a spin and it shot well, I didn't have to touch the sights at all, though there were some definite popped primer issues. I pulled the firing pin to see if I could diagnose the problem and found this:
Hitting it with the file once again, I rounded the FP tip down to a nice radius to eliminate the jagged edge and the stress risers that invariably creates in the primers and since then, absolutely 0 mechanical problems with this gun! I still had an aesthetic problem though, the handguard being so dark looked like crap. I decided to bite the bullet, strip it, and try to match the reddish color of the Albanian replacement stock. Here is what I came out with, it's not a perfect match, but it doesn't *really* bother me like that almost black handguard did:
Now I take her everywhere. She's the new bona fied 'truck gun' that I don't have to worry about scratching the metal or dinging the finish. Anytime I need an SKS, she's the first one I'll reach for and I haven't had any problems with her since.
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