WARNING
I am not a professional in any sense. Any time you involve a firearm there is risk of damage to property and injury to yourself or others, please take the correct precautions and practice effective safety measures anytime you handle a firearm. Again I am not a professional. Anything that works for me may not
work for you.
A few weeks ago I starting looking at guns that are availible online right now. Not for protection or hunting but just to have and shoot. Im not a gun superfan but I do have two hand me down shotguns and I do enjoy shooting when I do.
It's not too often that I do shoot, I don't want to pay to use a public range so I could either use a small shooting range my dad built at my parents house or I have a friend who's family owns a farm and we can shoot there, shooting with other people is pretty fun.
I like both of my shotguns, but I've been thinking on and off about buying a rifle or maybe a revolver to have and shoot as well. I was watching Youtube videos and checking online gunstores to see whats around right now. A gun store fairly local to me has a ton of military surplus SKS rifles.
Still packed in cosmoline and probably untouched for decades. I think the SKS has a little bit of historical value, being adopted into a few different armys of the cold war. I also think 7.62x39 is cool round. So I bought one.
I knew going in that the gun would have to be completely disassembled, anywhere cosmoline could get it would be there. Cosmoline is a preservitive used for long term storage of firearms. It goes on more like a liquid but it cools into a consistency more like petroleum jelly. After a long time exposed to air
it can dry out to become more like wax. Obviously, you dont want to shoot a gun that has that much gunk everywhere it can fit. So I started pulling the gun apart. It's really not hard at all and except for a few mishaps it could be done fairly quickly. I had unexpected difficulties with a few things.
Removing the trigger group, a button in the trigger gaurd has to be pressed in with a punch and the trigger guard is supposed to be spring loaded and jump out of the gun when the button is pressed in far enough to clear, my trigger guard is no longer springy and my button was gunked up.
I had to press in the button with both hands and have my father pull the trigger group out at the same time.
Removing the magazine, the magazine is supposed to be held in by the trigger group. Even after I had removed it the magazine still stayed in place and wouldnt budge. I suspect it was just jammed with cosmoline and I removed it by having my dad again hold the gun and the magazine closed and I
hit a wooden stick down into the bottom of the magazine until it fell out of the gun.
Removing the stock, from a few videos I had seen you could break loose the barrel and reciever from the gun and take the magazine out of the stock in one motion by holding the gun by the barrel and receiver and rocking the stock down into the floor. What's supposed to happen is the magazine
will be pushed out of the gun, the barrel will get loose and it and the reciever will come out of the stock, and the now empty stock will fall a small distance onto the floor. What happened for me was the barrel and reciever did move about a quarter of an inch but the magazine did not budge.
I hit the gun against the floor again the magazine still did not come out and it cracked my stock. When you are fixing something, no matter what it is, you should probably do every step right the first time.
With the gun now disassembled I was ready to do the actual cleaning. This was somewhat time consuming and involved a lot of scrubbing and running cotton swabs and cleaning pads inside of things, but overall I don't think it was too bad. The basic procedure I followed was to let smaller items sit in a container
of mineral spirits to break up the cosmoline, I used an old metal dogfood bowl. Larger things, I would soak a paper towel in mineral spirits then run it all over until it wouldnt hold anymore dirt. Then repeat with a new paper towel. To get inside things like the gas tubes and piston chambers I used
cotton swabs. Once again soaked in mineral spirits. A lot of the cosmoline came off just by being exposed to mineral spirits and being rubbed off, a few places gave me trouble and I had to get a little more rougher than that. For the stubborn stuff I used a nylon brush I bought for cleaning guns (pretty
much a toothbrush with an additonal, thinner head on the opposite end). That thin side actually came in handy often, I wouldn't have been able to use a normal toothbrush to get the places I need brushed out. For the barrel I used a cleaning rod I already had for my shotguns, I just soaked the cleaning pads
for it in mineral spirits and ran probably around ten down the barrel. Until they came out about as clean as they went in. Then I ran a wire brush down the barrel like how you normally clean a gun.
With everything cleaned of cosmoline I did a final rinse for most parts in warm soapy water, then rinsed them again with clean water, then dried them by hand and lightly oiled them with an oily rag. Just to keep them safe before I put everything back together. If you are wondering, I use Hoppe's
Elite gun oil. But I am not a professional.
With everything cleaned up I just had to put some oil around the firing pin and bolt, inside the trigger group, and inside of the receiver. Now the individual parts were all ready to go back together, but I still had that crack in my stock. I thought about not messing with it and letting it go as is
but I worried about it continuing to crack even more or split the stock outright. I know this is an army surplus rifle with the original stock but it isn't like the SKS is a rare gun by any means and there are probably a ton of military SKS with all numbers matching and in great shape. So I decided to
try some DIY repair on this stock. I did a little research online and went with using Titebond III wood glue and a few small brass wood screws for extra security. Even if the Titebond doesn't hold because of how much oil is in the wood, the screws will stay. Though it will look ugly for now until I can
borrow a Dremel to take the screw head down to match the wood, after that, if I do it correctly and carefully, it should just be a few brass dots visible. I applied the Titebond with my finger the best that I could then clamped the stock using a C-clamp and two thin pieces of wooden board.
I let that sit over night and removed it around noon the next day. To screw the stock I used four #4x1.5" brass wood screws I bought at Lowes. I clamped the stock upside down in a vice and pre-drilled my holes using a 1/16 drill bit. I drove the actual screws in by hand with a screwdriver. I wanted to take things slow after cracking the stock.
With everything in order it was finally time to put the thing back together. Assembly was pretty fast and went fairly close to how it was supposed to. The barrel and reciever gave a little trouble when going back into the stock, but that was probably my fault with the stock. That large screw on the side of
the stock is where the metal parts of the gun mate to the stock in order to transfer recoil to the wood and into your shoulder. You aren't supposed to turn the screw because it isnt made to be removed, but a small amount of turning was required to let the barrel slip down into a cutout made for it to fit into.
I had worked quite a few hours that weekend on that gun to shoot the gun while i was still at my parents house. I managed to get everything back together by midday sunday, and I wasnt going to just not shoot it. How good would a gun be if you didn't even trust it to shoot? So I was ready to take it into
the woods and see how my efforts paid off.
The range at my parent's is small, at a little over 120 ft or 40 yards for the rifle target and half that for the pistol target. Though it is private and there is little chance of endagering anyone, we have a hill serving as a backstop and the area behind that is a large field.
The gun does shoot, and it feeds fine and locks the bolt open when it is out of ammo, like it is supposed to. When you press the magazine release all of the ammo falls out of the gun and the gun is clear, like its supposed to. When I have a full magazine and pull the bolt back and let it forward no rounds
shoot off and the entire magazine stays put. Like its supposed to. I think its safe to say the gun is safe and operating as its supposed to without malfunciton, though I have only fired 20 rounds throught it.
Now let's talk about the actual shooting. I shot 20 rounds at a 12 inch square target at a distance a little longer than 120 feet. The ammo I shot was Wolf 122 Grain FMJ, though I dont think I am a good enough shooter for it to matter. At that distance with 20 shots fired, I hit 16 with 4 going high. Disregarding
the one outlier on the right the shots that did hit were all contained in around a 7 inch circle. At 120 feet that may not be that impressive but I feel like the bullets are all going where I want them to go and the wide spread is all on me. I havent shot this rifle before and it is my first rifle that is my own
(it is also the first gun I have ever bought!). I feel like I need some time with the sights to understand how to line them up correctly and follow through with my shots and my shot groupings would see a huge improvement.
Update: May 13th 2022
I recently took the SKS back out to my parent's house and spent some time figuring out the sights. The first time I shot it (the only time I had shot it at the time I wrote this article) I was looking through the sight in a fashion that I now know is called a "center-hold". The center-hold is where a gun is aimed with the sight touching the center of what you want to hit. When I shot it again I tried something called a "6 O'clock-hold". The 6 O'clock-hold is where a gun is aimed with the sight sitting beneath what you want to hit. The original thread I read about the 6 O'clock-hold refered to it as "pumpkin on a post" aiming and that seems to be the common name.
Either way of aiming would be fine as long as you adjust your sights to the way you want to aim. Holding the sight below what you want to hit allows you to see more while you are looking down the sight and is what I want to sight my SKS in for. I tried shooting this way with the SKS and it seems like it was already sighted in for this style of aiming. Though when I get a tool that allows me to adjust the sight I still want to bring it down a little since I am still shooting higher than I intend to.
I shot this target at 40 yards with 5 rounds of the same Wolf 122 Grain FMJ ammo that I used earlier in the article. The target was positioned on the board on it's side like in the photo. The bottom-right whole is a double hit where I shot the same spot twice. I still wish it was a little tighter but its an improvement over how I shot before.
Overall I think this was a fun project and I hope to get the oppurtunity to go to my friend's farm and shoot with him. I may also try to improve my aim at my parents house whenever I visit. It is my rifle and only shooting it will make me better with it. I have a few links I would like to share that I used myself.
If you've read this far I appreciate it a lot. I didn't plan on making this content for my website but I thought it might be interesting to write about it. There wont be very much gun stuff in the immediate future. Guns are expensive, though I could do something with my shotguns.
