Here is something you do not see everyday. This is a Polish parade rifle laminated stock SKS. What differentiates this from a regular SKS stock is the 4 holes in the laminated gas tube wood. The stock also has a steel butt plate with no cutout underneath for a cleaning kit. The stock is quite heavy, I would say 1.5lb heavier than a regular SKS. The laminated wood is beautifully constructed and just glows in sunlight. The blueing is polished and the bayonet is also polished. The buttplate has a lot of damage incurred over the years of being slammed into the pavement during parade duty, but still cleaned up all right. Seeing as how the Poles never made their own SKS rifle, but rather used Russian SKS rifles with replacement stock (the Poles did not like the Russian stocks, so they made their own) I decided to do the same thing. I could not find a well priced excellent condition Russian SKS rifle, so I took the next best thing... a Yugo M59. The exterior of the rifle was in really good shape so I swapped the stock over and gently cleaned the blueing till it shined. All I need now is another Yugo M59 stock screw to fill in the extra hole in the wrist and she will be good to go. This spring I will take her out and feed her some non-corrosive ammo and see how she shoots (should be NO recoil with all that extra weight). Unfortunately, the Yugo M59 donor rifle has strong rifling but with pitting in the grooves from a combination of corrosive ammunition, non-chrome lined bore and poor cleaning practices. I guess I could have used a Chinese SKS as a donor rifle, but the tradeoff of poorly finished metal and a crappy trigger was not enough to balance out the chrome lined barrel. Seeing as how I do not expect to shoot this rifle all that much I can live with the pitting. All in all she turned out pretty nice. When I got the stock it was dirty, dented and had cracks in the shellac like coating. I gently stripped off the shellac and raised some of the dents using a wet cloth and an iron. I then cleaned the stock with orange hand cream cleaner (worked really well) and went over it very lightly with 320 grit sandpaper. Unfortunately I could not fix the imperections in the buttplate and near the buttplate, the wood just had too much damage from years of slamming into pavement... I then followed with 00 steel wool. 9 coats of Tru-Oil later and the finish nearly perfectly matches the finish the Poles used. Each coat was left to dry for 24 hours and then gone over with 000 steel wool before another coat was applied. I think turned out quite nicely. Was a fun project!
The solid polished buttplate and the 4 hole laminated gas tube wood are dead giveaways as well.
