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?!?