The Chinese versions no longer take up table after table at most gun shows, and gone are the “deals” that gave you a rifle, sling, handful of accessories, and a few boxes of ammo all for less than a C-note. Since then, we note some of the sources for the SKS’s are drying up, particularly those from the USSR, and prices for good SKS rifles - no matter their origin - are slowly going up. We found an ugly duckling in that batch that was an excellent shooter, and one of our test crew bought it for about $150. In that report, we told you some of the things to look for when considering an SKS. In December 2000, we looked at four others, three from Romania and one from the USSR. Some time back (October 1999), we reviewed one of these Simonov-designed semiautos in a test of three different types of rifles that could handle the 7.62 x 39 round (the others were the AK-47 and Ruger Mini-30), and in our report we liked the arsenal-refinished Soviet-made SKS, and suggested you grab one if you could find one. But you’d never write home to mama about how attractive a rifle an SKS is. They’ll put most of their shots into a four- or five-inch circle at a hundred yards, and that’s plenty good enough for their intended job. On average, they seem to shoot M1-Carbine-size groups. The accuracy isn’t generally good enough to be called that, unless you’ve got a lucky specimen on your hands. It fires them reliably and slings out the empties like an outraged matron encountering last week’s garbage. It, like so many rifles based on the tapered 7.62 x 39 round, catches the cartridges that its two-piece bolt strips out of that fixed, ten-shot magazine with great ease. The SKS is a homely brute, and many of its simple mechanisms are largely outdated by today’s weapons’ standards.
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