The Rare Chinese Stamped Receiver SKS

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! In 1970 and 1971, China experimented with a stamped-receiver version of the SKS. About 6,000 of these rifles were made each of the two years, and a number of them have come into the US as commercial exports. We don’t have any official records from China about this program, but it seems clear that this was an experiment to reduce the production cost of what was originally a relatively expensive, time consuming rifle to make. It’s easy to think of the SKS as cheap because of the prices they Brough in the US for many years, but in truth the SKS was a very 1940s sort of design with all milled parts. It is only the massive economy of scale from Chinese production capacity that made them cheap on the American market. Anyway, circe 1970 China experimented with this stamped design,