A couple months back, before Professor Booty started helping me on the weekends, I was posting “Great Gun Deal of the Weekend� reports. I spoke about finding a dealer who did low cost transfers and ordering your own rifles direct from the distributor as a way to 1. Find something you really want and 2. Get a damn good deal on it.
A few weeks back, I hooked up with the gunsmith who built my Boomershoot rifle to get a copy of his FFL. During our dealings while building that gun, he let me know that he not only has an FFL, but also does $25 transfers.
Once I got some money saved up I started looking through the Shotgun News for a deal on SKS’s. After dog-earing a few pages and visiting the various distributor’s websites, I settled on the deal at Southern Ohio Gun Int’l Inc.
After mailing the FFL to them, I ordered a pair of Yugoslavian pre-1966 SKS’s. When they arrived at the smith’s place a couple weeks later, I went in and did all the required paperwork and became the owner of some very cosmolined Simonov rifles.
I took them home and gave them a very thorough scrubbing with aerosol brake cleaner and Hoppe’s #9 and to my delight, discovered that I now had two very nice Simonov rifles.
That is what I spent the majority of the day shooting at the range on Saturday.
One actually has a stock with some nice grain in it and both of them have NRA grade VG bores, although you couldn’t tell until they were well scrubbed. I have ordered the obligatory hammer and sear spring kits from Wolff Gunsprings since the eastern-bloc rifles I have come across all seem to have been stored with their actions open, leading to light hammer falls and light primer hits.
I have also ordered a new rear sight for the gun from Tech-Sights to check out. If you own an SKS or are thinking of owning one, you might want to go to the site and check them out. I will issue a range report whence it arrives.
I urge everyone out there to find their own FFL holder and get to looking for deals. SOGII did good by me and in all, after $130 for the rifle, $10 to ship it and $25 to transfer it, I’m into these for $165 a piece. Even with adding in the $10 for the Wolff spring kit and I’m still $25-$50 less that the local shops want for something similar.