SKS - 8% of rounds key holing

Mines gone 1000+ rounds with no cleaning and never keyholed, Even some with corrosion, Pitting, damaged crown the works. I still think its the batch of ammo and your wasting you time messing around with it. Barnaul has lots of negative comments and issues even in newer guns. Lots of bad batches.
 
Key holing I'm guessing is the ammo. Accuracy problems could be coming from the aftermarket stock/stuff.
It's never a bad idea to try out a gun in its original form...
 
I have 3 SKS rifles. I put 4 crates through my first one without cleaning it. I only cleaned the action once because the bolt hold open device quit working due to being gummed up. I still haven't touched the bore yet.
 
I didn't read all the posts, but it sounds most likely the problem of your keyholing is from damage crown. Not uncommon for military surplus rifles. I've fixed several of them with the exact same problem.
 
I definitely do not clean my firearms that regularly but bearhunter does have a valid point that at some point accuracy is degraded and eventually mechanical function becomes an issue. So that is part 2 of this experiment for me. I will scrub the rifle down this weekend and then run it until I have noticeable accuracy issues or issues with the rifle and will maintain a log to see how many rounds it takes.

I am leaning toward faulty rounds since I had a low number of key holes. The bore was filthy but if it was dirty enough to de-stabilize the bullets I would think that it would affect a higher number of rounds.

I re-measured the diameter of 20 bullets last night and the majority of them were 0.3080 inch. One was 0.3090 inch and seven were 0.3085 inch. Although measurements were to four decimal places the quality of the equipment used is questionable. I measured the before and was content that the 60 rounds were close enough to being standard at 0.3080 inch. I am going to re-measure the remainder and separate them using the three different measurement to see if I can find any difference in performance.
 
Grock-co said:
Now that is too funny but you forgot to include the collectability in to the situation.
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Yes, they cost us $200 ish, if you were in the U.S. $400-$800. If you were to manufacture these days ??? Maybe the price of a Norc m305? Military rifles, surplus or in service, are built to a relatively high standard, to take a beating and be fairly accurate!
I think you can expect a fair bit from a military surplus rifle, and not key holing!
I think it is the Ammo, try some dirty old Russian or Czech!!:)
 
I only experienced (infrequent) key holing with one SKS out of the many I have owned. It was a non-chrome 1950 where the first 4-6 inches of rifling nearest the muzzle was worn pretty smooth and the rifling near the crown was very worn. Solution: it became a parts gun, and I bought another.
 
The Kurgan said:
I only experienced (infrequent) key holing with one SKS out of the many I have owned. It was a non-chrome 1950 where the first 4-6 inches of rifling nearest the muzzle was worn pretty smooth and the rifling near the crown was very worn. Solution: it became a parts gun, and I bought another.
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Was the wear from your shooting a ton of ammo through it or did you buy it like that?
 
burnt_servo said:
if you can hit something the size of a pie plate with a sks at 100 yards , you are doing well .... :D
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Because of the crude iron sight design I agree with this statement.

burnt_servo said:
if it has a chromed barrel , you don't have barrel issues.
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Chrome lined barrels don't key hole bullets at 100 yards.

burnt_servo said:
a 2 second inspection will tell you if you have worn rifling or a damaged crown.
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Yep.

burnt_servo said:
and finally fmj ammo is designed to tumble on impact ( since it is illegal for it to expand like hunting ammo in combat ) . so they make it as unstable in flight as possible , while still being able to hit a pie plate at 100 yards.
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FMJ is not designed to tumble in mid air before it hits its target.

burnt_servo said:
while the bullets maybe key holing , there is a good chance they are supposed to be doing that
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You have to be kidding?
 
Crude Iron Sights you say??? The sights on the SKS are perfectly adequate out to and beyond 100yds for reasonably precise shooting. Biggest issue with folks today is they are so used to shooting with scopes they don't practice or even use iron sights. It isn't uncommon these days to talk with people that have never used iron sighted firearms of any sort.

The sighting arrangement on the SKS was designed to cover a lot of relevant to a troopy's normal battle situations. Up close, say 25yds the rear sight is seldom used when this happens as anything but a blurry guide. The same goes for the post on the front sight. The top of the rear sight and the front sight protector become the sights of choice because they are extremely fast to acquire when things get hairy.

I have several SKS rifles. Most are in excellent condition other than one. The worst of the litter has a great bore and is well used but more than serviceable and always reliable. It shoots good ammo consistently into 3 inches or less at 100 yards and it doesn't care who is shooting it.

As I age, my eyes don't focus properly on iron sights properly unless the sight radius is very long such as what is on rifles with 29in bbls, which by the way give a very similar sight picture as the SKS. No one calls those sights crude and those rifles are often capable of sub moa accuracy with good ammo and proper care.
 
You know, perhaps I'm missing something here.

If 50-80% of the rounds were keyholed on impact, I'd definitely blame the gun for it.

With just 8-10%? I'm thinking the gun may be fine and it's the ammo quality control that's at fault. Are all the keyholed rounds hitting lower than the average point of impact? They may have low speed, as someone pointed out earlier.
 
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