I like the wood that your stock was made from, whatever that would be! My "C" series M59 refurb is C-38861, so 2,750 rifles later than yours. The wood that my stock is made from looks a lot different than yours. Not sure if that means anything. Some of these stocks would be great looking if we could refinish them to their original glory. But not going to do it, though.
The M59/66A1's that I have don't seem to have the more interesting wood like these M59's. How many types of wood did the Yugoslav rifles get fitted with?
Very nice acquisition Phos! My local gun shops just don't have anything in the way of SKS, or milsurp, in general. I keep looking though.
firstchoice
Thanks for posting pictures of yours.
I think yours may be the same type of wood. It's likely just from a different part of the log. The use of the
flatsawn technique is the most efficient use of the log, and I'm sure efficient use of scarce resources was the main interest of 1950's to 1960's Yugoslavia. My stock came from a cut at the edge of the log but the angle of the grain will increase from nearly 0 degrees all the way to 90 degrees and then back to nearly 0 degrees as they slice boards off of the log, so this creates a lot of different grain patterns. I think the wood looks a lot like walnut to me in some characteristics, but not in others, so I'm not certain what type of wood it is. The Yugoslavians definitely used walnut earlier on their Mausers, especially the pre-WWII Mausers, but like everywhere else in Europe,
Juglans regia, aka English walnut, became harder to come by as the continent lurched into and through WWII.
Perhaps they all are elm stocks and they were just finished differently earlier in production. The wood is darker and the surface is a lot smoother on these stocks than on the typical reddish-blonde elm stocks that I've seen used before and after these C-block examples, so I lean strongly toward it being a different wood than elm.
Yeah, slim pickings here too. I don't see many SKSs in my LGS, and when I do see them, they have often been poorly treated (e.g., there's a bubba'd Chinese in a Russian stock with a mag well chiseled by a dull-toothed beaver and a 20 round mag sitting there now). My other M59s, LBs or standard, were all acquired from Dan's, as this is the first M59 I've ever seen locally.