Cleaning up the SKS really wasn’t so bad after all. I followed some great directions from YouTube for disassembly (https://youtu.be/cRp7qb02bhg), the whole thing went off quite well. The hardest part that I found was disassembling and reassembling the trigger group. There is a particularly strong spring that releases the hammer when you pull the trigger. I don’t own a vice like is used in the video so I needed to find an alternate method.

In another video, a comment stated that the way to compress the spring with the hammer to release it was to use the bolt carrier and press it down. This… worked.

I then soaked all of the pieces in a bath of boiling hot water and mineral spirts for 20 minutes to remove the cosmoline. Cosmoline melts at somewhere between 60C and 85C, the hot water combined with the mineral spirts did a fine job.

Using nitrile gloves, I transferred the parts from the mineral spirits bath to a second tub of hot water… shaking off and straining as much of the mineral spirits as possible. This was further successful in cleaning off the parts.

I then pulled all of the pieces out of the bath and dried them, using some canned air (which was a mistake, it cooled off the pieces rather than letting the heat from the hot water help to dry them out… I should have got my compressor out) but it all dried nonetheless. Then I gave it a spray of aerosol gun oil.

Cleaning the barrel was something that I expected would be… nastier… than it was. The exterior of the rifle was not coated in cosmoline like I’ve seen in many other videos on YouTube. It was quite clean on the outside however on the inside, it’s pretty obvious that there was some cosmoline that needed to be cleaned out. The barrel was much like the exterior, relatively free of cosmoline. I swabbed it out and flushed it with brake fluid which resulted in more black cleaning patches (carbon) than yellow cleaning patches (cosmoline) going into the trash. The rifle had been fired, some cleaning would have had to be done to fire the rifle… hence why there was no cosmoline in the barrel. So, I oiled the barrel and let it sit for reassembly… after dinner.

Putting it back together, per the video… was quite easy. The hardest part of the reassembly was the same hardest part of the disassembly… the trigger group. Using the bolt carrier was how I got it all back together. And then… it was done. It felt like quite an accomplishment for me.

I can’t wait until I can take it out to shoot! I have a couple hundred rounds of 7.62x39mm ready for it!

A person can just sit in analysis paralysis and never write anything. Another method is procrastination passing as quality control, avoiding writing or releasing something until it is good enough or even perfect.

The thing to get over this is to just do it. Just write. Post something, post anything. It may be good, it may be ass… you just need to do something. So that’s what I’m doing. Writing.

I bought a surplus Russian SKS rifle a couple of weeks ago and it arrived last week. I unboxed it and it’s even cooler than I could have imagined.

The rifle I bought was manufactured in 1954, making it almost 70 years old. (My dad is still older.) Russia produced a metric buttload (2,700,000) of these semiautomatic rifles in the early 1950s and then quickly fell into obsolescence, subsequently being put into storage once the Kalashnikov AK-47 was adopted as the primary rifle to be used by the Soviet military.

I’m not sure when in the process the rifles would be dunked in cosmoline however all surplus SKS rifles are sure to have it on the outside of the rifle to varying degrees but for sure it exists on the inside of the rifle. Thus, a surplus rifle needs to be stripped down and all its pieces need to be cleaned thoroughly to remove this heavy grease.

The rifle I’ve received is actually quite clean on the outside however the inside is likely a very different story. YouTube has proven to be a very good resource for educating myself on what I will need to do to clean this rifle. I’ve got mineral spirits, some non-chlorinated brake cleaner, nitrile gloves, compressed air… probably should have grabbed some small plastic containers but there’s still time.

I don’t know what people would have done back in the day, before YouTube to figure out how to clean up surplus rifles….. probably read a book or a magazine article. I know… read a book?!?