So they actually have to cut the mag down and reweld it? Thats a shame! Maybe you guys could work on changing to pinning of some sort!
Really? The end of cheap SKS's?
- Thread starter grelmar
- Start date
Well, wherever and whenever they turn up, buy them, and when our retailers get more in, buy more.! Better in our friendly hands than our troops and our friends troops wind up looking down the barrel of them in a third world country! If we are buying at $200-ish then the merchants would rather sell to our suppliers than for $5 a piece to the bad guys!
I see Westrifle has gone back to a conventional rivet method. Probably for the best. The internal pin was prone to feeding issues in some instances.
Here's Westrifle's new rivet method. Very discreet.
Here's Westrifles earlier "metal block pinned to follower pivot point" method. This later evolved into a smaller piece of round bar stock.
Here's weimajack's rivet method. Also very clean, and flat.
Here's the oh so lovely "frankenpin" method. Thankfully no longer done.
Here's my favourite method, small bar stock welded to follower arm, employed on the early 2008 IZH imports.
weimajack's rivet method looks exactly like the ones coming from Trade-Ex, I wonder why that is?
FreedomIsn'tFree
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Why do the Chinese SKS's I've seen lately have no markings other than a serial # and the back sling mount is on the bottom of the stock like the Russian ones.
I heard from a retailer that those ones are actually not military rifles, but were cooked up specifically for the export market. But who knows if that is true. I have also heard from a retailer that the Russian "gold bayonet" models are actually parade rifles. 
FreedomIsn'tFree
CGN Ultra frequent flyer
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I have a "316" and the quality isn't as good as the ones I've seen that have no markings. The blueing is terrible, almost brown in color, and the stock is fairly rough.
That's because they are special covert operations ones meant to be supplied to a radical group about to take over a democratic country and are worth a premium price because of this! They also fire 2 shots at once and are twice as deadly.
No! just kidding about the above, they are pretty common, I think it is because they are early manufacture and at that point they did not bother marking them with anything but serial number. here is a previous post about them -
http://www.canadiangunnutz.com/foru...58-received-my-sks-no-factory-stamps-markings
No rewelding, the mag itself is cut back so only 5 (or 7 rounds in my case, which is the legal maximum in NZ with a standard firearms license) rounds can be fit in. Looks like the pinned technique would be easy to reverse, but I imagine that would make the rifle illegal....
So it is cut back from the top? Interesting. We had svt-40 chopped similarly years ago but then they went this way, maybe some day 10 round mags will be legal for these guns!
They were never $75 guns... They were $75 on top of a crate of ammo that was $60-$75 above the going rate, and shipped at $20-$40 above the going rate, so...
In the end, you might have saved about $20 over getting a Russian + a $225 crate of ammo from a number of places that would have given free shipping. By the time you were "all in" with the Marstar deal (combo price + shipping), you might have had to look around a bit, but not too hard, to get the same price + or - $10-$20 from a number of different online shops.
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Not sure who weimajack's supplier is. Perhaps it is Tradex. I call it "weimajack's method" simply because most of my premium SKS's with this rivet method are from him. Just an FYI that almost all retailers carry/carried this method.
Personally, I prefer a clean and secure rivet method over any method that messes with the function of the magazine. In the end, we're stuck with 5-round SKS's, and you want to be sure they shoot 100% of the time.
The external magazine is cut back in size and I imagine so is the internal box (I don't have the SKS in front of me). Certainly permanent!
There were only 5 big importers of SKS's recently into Canada - Trade-Ex, Bell, North Silva, Marstar and Westrifle. Some of these bulk importers then wholesale re-sold them on to others who then also sold them to the retail public market. You can if you want to, narrow down who brought in what by their mag blocking method.
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Actually when you narrow down this 4 importers. There will be only 2 sources of SKSs left, 90% of Canadian SKS imports were arranged to certain degree by 1 company. Magazine blocking was left to the bulk customer wishes. The cheap skates got smelter grade rifles and nasty pin job. These willing to pay literally extra $5 got nice pin job and very good to mint rifles
No a lot of the Russian ones are too.
