Returning cosmoline-covered SKS's to working order

[Stomper]

I see frozen pizza-lasagna boxes....

 

[Joe Link]

I see frozen pizza-lasagna boxes....

I wish, love that frozen lasagna! Those are my parents' fry daddy's or whatever they are. I assume they bought them on TV during a buy one get one special, cause who needs two? Probably one of my Christmas gifts

 

[GOG]

I've got some stripper clips sitting around for those guys. Let me know if you'd like 'em and I'll mail them up to you. I have no use for them and postage is cheap if not always efficient.

 

[Joe Link]

I've got some stripper clips sitting around for those guys. Let me know if you'd like 'em and I'll mail them up to you. I have no use for them and postage is cheap if not always efficient.

That'd be awesome! I know so little about the SKS, I didn't even know they used stripper clips.

 

[F2CMaDMaXX]

I'm way late to this party, but i agree with the sun and hot water methods, i wouldn't use anything but protecting oil afterwards, esp not WD40 on the wood.

The hot days we have right now are perfect and in the direct sun, parts get up to crazy temps if you leave them.

 

[Bon Sauvage]

Should you ever decide to get rid of all, and I do mean all, of the cosmoline out of the wood you are welcome to use my home made "EZ Bake Oven". (Garbage can and light bulbs.)

 

[bolus]

mmmmmmm stew

 

[Joe Link]

Though I wanted to do a better job of sweating the cosmoline out of the stocks, I had a bit of time to kill the other day so I decided to put one together. Having disassembled them in 2013, I didn't completely forgot how easy these were to put back together. The most difficult part was installing the new gas tube ferrule pin and then grinding it down. Speaking of those pins, out of the three guns I was only able to tap the pin out of this one. When I have more time I'm going to have to drill the head off the pins of the others, clean up the gas tube covers, and then re-assemble them with new pins like I did this one. When working with the ferrule make sure you don't damage it, it's a $20-$50 part. Losing daylight and really just wanting to see if the rifle functioned, I didn't bother installing any of the hardware which wasn't necessary. Though I'm planning on replacing the firing pins in these guns, I haven't done so yet.

By the time it was reassembled it was almost dark (despite what it looks like in the photo), but I just had to test fire it. It's been a long time since I shot in low light conditions and I completely forgot how difficult it is to see iron sights. I didn't have targets handy as I didn't plan on shooting, just a few of those crappy neon gel pack targets. Though I failed to hit any of them even though I was ~50 ft away, the gun functioned flawlessly. As someone who owns rifles worth many times this, this beater had no problem putting a smile on my face. I'm really looking forward to getting some proper targets setup and seeing if it's anywhere close to the paper. One down, two to go, and I'm keeping all three

PS: Big thanks to @GOG for sending me a handful of stripper clips for these and refusing to let me even cover the shipping

 

[GOG]

You're welcome Joe. Shoot the heck out of them.

 

[Sgt Nambu]

Hey Joe, if you were to ceracoat that SKS the same color as the towel it's resting on, you could make points with the GF! Nice score on the SKS triplets, BTW!