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Just brought my first rifle home.

{YBBS}Sage said:
If you want to lubricate them, use a dry lube like moly or graphite (though graphite doesn't stick as well.)

Practice practice. Hopefully you can remove the bolt for practicing.

Well you at least need the bolt carrier because it has the clip groove. Whatever you do, I advise against chambering a live round until you are more familiar with your gun. And of course, point it in a safe direction anyway.
 
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You can actually practice stripping rounds off with the magazine open, although it feels a bit different.

Remember, tilt the clip as far forward as it will go comfortably.

A near trick I like to do is pull back with the clip as I remove it, so as it clears the guide, the bolt carrier is pulled back enough for the bolt holdopen to get out of the way.

Makes for a neat ssssssCLACK noise as I remove the clip and the bolt slams close.
 
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What I've been doing is by practicing with a closed magazine but I have the safety on and I never pull back the bolt carrier so the round won't chamber. (I've heard that if you pull back the bolt carrier and ease it slowly rather than let it fly home, it won't chamber, but I don't feel like fiddling with a weapon of war for a function it wasn't designed for) I'll simply release the mag latch and let the rounds fall out, reload stripper clips, strip again. So far I've only got 20 rounds used for practice while I've got 980 rounds in near my bed waiting for a SHTF situation before I go shooting with it.
 
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The Soup Nazi said:
What I've been doing is by practicing with a closed magazine but I have the safety on and I never pull back the bolt carrier so the round won't chamber. (I've heard that if you pull back the bolt carrier and ease it slowly rather than let it fly home, it won't chamber, but I don't feel like fiddling with a weapon of war for a function it wasn't designed for)
Guns are designed to chamber forcefully. If you ease the bolt forward, there's the possibility that perhaps the bolt won't close all the way. If you're in a combat situation, that's not a good thing. So yes, it is recommended that you let the bolt fly forward under it's spring force and don't "ease it."

I've never had it happen to me personally, but it's always better to operate guns as they were intended to be.

On a side note: make sure that you cleaned your bolt very well and the firing pin can move freely. You should be able to shake the bolt and hear the firing pin clink around. If not, there may be some cosmoline in the firing pin channel and you will need to clean it very well before firing. SKS's have a reputation of slam-fires... probably because they are cheap and widely available "cool military guns" that some people with little or no firearms experience buy and then they go straight to the range... without cleaning or inspecting their 40-year-old surplus firearm covered in grease. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Anyway, a slam-fire is where the gun goes uncontrollably full-auto because the firing pin was stuck forward. While this may sound cool, it is extremely dangerous. One guy's SKS went full auto and he dropped the gun. The gun bounced around and the final, 10th round went through his friend's eye killing him instantly.

So make sure that firing pin can shake freely and isn't sticky. And never oil the firing pin (this attracts dirt and makes it sticky). Leave it bone dry.
 
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The Soup Nazi said:
What I've been doing is by practicing with a closed magazine but I have the safety on and I never pull back the bolt carrier so the round won't chamber. (I've heard that if you pull back the bolt carrier and ease it slowly rather than let it fly home, it won't chamber, but I don't feel like fiddling with a weapon of war for a function it wasn't designed for) I'll simply release the mag latch and let the rounds fall out, reload stripper clips, strip again. So far I've only got 20 rounds used for practice while I've got 980 rounds in near my bed waiting for a SHTF situation before I go shooting with it.
Go shooting already!!! Geez! You might be over-thinking it just a bit. :p

Clean the grease out of the rifle, toss it in a case, then head to a range with hearing and eye protection. Don't forget the ammo.

The longest I've waited to take a new gun shooting was with my Mosin, and that was only 2 days (after the 10-day acquisition wait)... The soonest was my old Ithaca that I shot BEFORE I bought, and the next-closest was my Mossberg 835 that I took to the range from the gun store.
 
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Soup Nazi, if your rifle is clean (read my post about paying extra attention to the firing pin) and if you know how to operate it safely (I'm assuming this isn't your first gun), go out and shoot.

If you have any SKS questions, I highly recommend www.sksboards.com for all of your needs. In fact, head over there right now, sign up, and introduce yourself. It's a great SKS community.
 
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With an SKS, "just go shoot it!" isn't as good an idea as it might be with, say, a bolt-action rifle.

Why?

If there's goop in the firing pin channel (note: spray Breakfree CLP in there, it'll blast/wash most of the crap out), the firing pin will stick forward, and will slamfire. If you're really unlucky (or lucky, depending on how you look at it), it will ripple off the entire magazine slamfiring.

This is not as cool as it sounds—slamfiring is different from "going auto", in that "going auto" implies that the bolt has actually gone into battery and the problem is with the trigger pack. Slamfiring means that the bolt has NOT locked, and you are firing the weapon in blowback mode. Too much of this will destroy the receiver, and possibly fling chunks of the receiver cover/bolt/bolt carrier at your face.

So, for the children, please make sure the firing pin channel is clean before you try to shoot your SKS. :p

***

"Slowly" isn't what will keep it from chambering a round as it closes—pushing down on the top round (so the face of the bolt doesn't push on it) will keep it from chambering as you close the action. (I do this before going to sleep, so my bedside SKS is sort-of-but-not-really loaded.)
 
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Closing the bolt slowly can cause the bolt not to go all the way to battery. Close it slowly and you might just have to give it a little "forward assist." :p

I'm not telling him to just pick it up and then "go out and shoot it" as it was... He just seems to be having a bit of trouble comitting to shooting (plus, some area ranges don't allow you to load more than 2 rounds into an SKS.)

Here, I'll help you out:

I'm going to Chabot on Sunday. I'll probably show up around noon. I'm planning on shooting my .22 mostly, but I'll bring my Mosin along for a little bit of knocking everybody's targets off the stands.
 
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Oh, that. Yeah, that's one of the oddities of any tilt-lock action—there is a defined point at which the bolt is, in fact, tilted down as an incline on the bolt carrier shoves the bolt down into its locking recess. For the most part, if you're real gentle settling the bolt group on that ledge, then friction can (sometimes, not always) overcome the force of the recoil spring.

Look at the bolt carrier and bolt and how they relate to each other and how the whole setup locks. It'll be very educational.
 
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So I just came back, put a lot of holes in the paper, only 50 percent of my shots but I forgot to zero in my rear sight before firing 1/3 of my rounds. On the other hand, I'm very confident that if I were firing at Herman Goering, he'd be sufficently dead right now, managed to not shoot the pieces of wood holding up the backboards, witnessed a very tight grouping from an asian man firing a Mauser, and all around had a great time. Sage, I will get back to you once I get to the people who wanted to shoot with me before you.
 
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GonzoX said:
Cool, Im going to have to research this further. Thanks a ton.

Garand rifles cost an arm and a leg online and at gunshows.

Im getting excited now. Thanks for the info.

Get one through CMP for around $500. I was very close to doing this but opted to go with a Mosins and SKS's instead.

Btw, you can probably pick up a Century FAL battle rifle for $550. The main advantage it has over the Garand is that it uses detachable magazines. But of course, the Garand has all that WW2 history behind it.
 
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