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This is a SKS forty-five.
SKS is short for something in Russian that I can't pronounce, and the forty-five stands
for the year it went into service.
It's a rifle chambered in 7.62x39, the same round that was subsequently used in the AK-47
that replaced it. And look! It's even got a bayonet!
Which means you can practice all your Mount & Blade bayonet moves!
All two of them; the overhead, and the underhand.
The safety is located near the trigger, and it has a fixed box magazine with an original
capacity of ten rounds that is now limited to five.
The SKS is the first rifle for many because it's cheap to buy, and cheap to feed. Starting
at $200 you can get a nice Chinese SKS, or a rough around the edges Russian one. This
one is from 1940s Russia, and it came with this sling, these pouches, this oil can, cleaning
kit, and assorted tools, all of which smells like a hoarder's pile of wet newspapers from
1991. The idea of course being that you will feed it the cheapest centerfire rifle round
available, the 7.62x39 surplus that can be found for about 17 cents a round. These surplus
rounds actually come on stripper clips of 10 rounds, like these, that mount directly
onto the rifle, like so. Then all you do is press down, and this in turn loads your magazine.
This is a gas operated, tilting bolt semi automatic rifle.
The sights are simple front post, rear notch sights.
Adjustable from 100m, to a slightly optimistic 1000m.
It shot as accurate as a potatoe when I first got it, so you'll need a sight tool, or a scope.
It's accurate enough at 100m, while effective range is stated at 400m.
The round used, the 7.62x39, is known as the AK47 round.
This is due to the popularity and success of the AK47, even though the SKS predates it.
It's like when you tell a joke in a group of people and only one person hears you, and they repeat that
joke, and everybody laughs. That's what the AK47 is.
This sports a twenty inch barrel, good enough for a muzzle velocity of 2400 feet per second.
Recoil is pretty good, even for a person the size of a hobbit.
It's more of a gentle nudge.
And it shouldn't be, after all, at 3.85kg this meter stick is closer in weight with
the older, full power firing Mosin, than it's eventual successor, the AK.
Now this is where things go a little sideways for me. I'm built like a ten year old, but
I still like to shoot offhand, which is a fancy way of saying standing, but with the SKS
it's just not possible. Ergonomics barely exist, and the balance point feels like it's
somewhere 20 meters down range, so not only does my accuracy greatly suffer, but my arms
do too. You can tell by the design of this rifle that it's a mutt, a cross between the
battle rifles of yesteryear, and the more compact rifles that followed.
And that's not the only problem
It ejects cases with a little too much oomph. So if you have anybody to the right of you,
it will undoubtedly make it rain hot steel on them, which can make it kind of awkward if I'm honest.
But I guess it was a two for one kind of thing back in the day.
You have to hit someone with the case, and you have to hit someone with the bullet.
And the annoyances don't end there.
You get the SKS because it's cheap, and cheap to shoot, so you shoot the cheap stuff, you
shoot the surplus.The problem is that it is corrosive. When fired you end up with salt
in your rifle, which eventually leads to a rifle rife with rust.
Now you might say some have chrome lined bores, but other internal parts, like the gas system,
are still not immune to said rust.
You might say go fancy, buy commercial, or reload non corrosive rounds yourself, but
that's like suiting up for a pizza delivery, or going to Walmart for their truffle selection,
so you can sprinkle it on your freezer burned mac and cheese. It defeats the purpose of
why you got an SKS in the first place; to have a lot of cheap fun.
So you end up with a rifle that you HAVE to clean every time you shoot it, and while it's
a best practice to clean a firearm after you use it I still want to have the option to
not clean it, or at least put it off if life happens. With corrosive ammo you are forced
to make time for it, and that's... inconvenient.
So should you buy this heavy, non ideal, inconvenient rifle?
I would. You don't like the SKS because it's the best rifle you'll ever own, you like it
because it's the first rifle you'll ever own.
I like that I can tell it where it was made, at Tula factory because of this marking right here
I like the historical aspect of it all, that I'm using a rifle three times as old as I
am, shooting ammo twice as old as I am. The thought of that is kind of enchanting, it's
like drinking that 20 year old scotch when you're 18, driving that 50 year old car when
you're 25, or visiting that 1000 year old landmark... whenever.
That this existed way before I did, that it has lived a lifetime aleady is effervescence inducing.
You also buy into two ridiculously large communities at the same time in the SKS and 7.62x39. You
can run amok with aftermarket parts, disassembly is nice and easy, there's less than a dozen
main parts, and as I mentioned before without reloading it's the budget centerfire option.
And with these steel cased surplus rounds, range cleanup is pretty, pretty, easy.