North Vietnamese SKS

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on forgottenweapons.com i'm ian mccallum and today courtesy of ozark machine gun we are taking a look at a north vietnamese sks this is one of the so-called trinity of very scarce skss in the us the others being north korean and east german now these are actually largely chinese manufactured although that wasn't the intended outcome so basically this project began in 1959 when chinese factory number 296 that numbering system we won't get into here but that's an outgrowth of the arsenal numerical system that was put together in china uh during like the 1930s based on you know each province having a number at any rate it was arsenal 296 which manufactured sks rifles among other things and they were interested in setting up a series of foreign basically export uh helping other people set up production for the sks and this would be their project number one their very first export attempt north vietnam uh later ones would include places like albania but that's outside the scope of today's video again so uh 1959 they set up a proposed plan to build an arms factory in north vietnam vietnam and the north vietnamese approve it uh construction begins shortly thereafter and by 1962 the factory is actually ready to start spitting out products now this was intended to be a pretty serious arms factory it was intended to manufacture both small arms rifles like this pistols also up to heavy machine guns and also to manufacture tooling presumably to help expand manufacturing to other facilities as well we'll get to what ultimately happened to the factory after we take a close look at this but the way it began was the chinese factory 296 supplied this vietnamese factory number one with basically all of its core components they and this is fairly typical for setting up a manufacturing plant like this you would see it uh with russian assistance to a variety of countries setting up kalashnikov production is as the things got started before the factory was able to be manufacturing all of its own parts they would get a lot of parts from a russian advisory factory and that's what the chinese did here so throughout the production of these rifles factory one never really did get up and running making a lot of its own parts and so what we see are basically chinese skss with north vietnamese markings that were made in north vietnam so let me show you those unique markings the key marking on these rifles that distinguishes them primarily as north vietnamese is this simple star with a digit one in it and that indicates north vietnamese factory number one now the serial numbers are six digits but we can decode those and actually get some information out of them the first two digits are the year of production so this is a 1963 production gun as i said they started in 62 they would run until 65 and they actually had a single unbroken sequence of serial numbers so this is actually the 676 gun produced which came out in 63. by the time we get to the 1965 dates the actual sequential serial number has gotten up to about 6 000. so the folks over at sks boards uh one of the moderators there a guy named darren has done a fantastic job of uh collating a record of known north vietnamese sks's in the u.s or well really anywhere um but he has a great database of like 75 of them that very clearly shows this date and serial number progression so uh if you have one by the way check out uh that thread i will link to that form in the description and you can add your number to his database to help make it more complete the highest number he has on record there is i believe 58.70 something which gives us a final total production number of about 6 000 guns so really not very many at all that serial number is repeated on all the major parts so we have it here on the bulk carrier we have it here on the stock there are actually a couple different fonts that were used they changed over time early on you have these narrow tall digits later those would change to wider spaced and and wider numbers stamped into the stock we'll see it marked here on the back of the receiver cover and then on the bottom of the magazine and the bottom of the trigger guard these rifles have all of the characteristics of relatively early chinese produced rifles because of course that's where the parts come from so you'll see first pattern rear sight blocks these long long shank threaded barrels the chinese would later switch to a spike type bayonet but early on they used blade bayonets and that's what will be found on the north vietnamese examples the stocks themselves are probably the only parts of these rifles that were actually manufactured in vietnam instead of simply being assembled there and that's because a wood stock is going to be one of the easiest parts to start up production of you'll see this one these are all veteran bring back guns by the way you will they've never been formally imported from anywhere so you will not find them with import marks and you don't really have to unlike chinese rifles where there's a lot of potential deception and fakery about what's a vietnam bring back gun and what's a commercial gun where maybe someone has uh you know has hidden or removed an import mark well the north vietnamese ones were never imported so all of the ones that exist in the country are vet bring backs and you'll see this has a a clearly worn vintage chinese style sling on it which fits perfectly one of the questions that comes up when looking at these rifles is you know why would vietnam make such a small number of rifles over you know a four year period aren't there more efficient ways to be getting small arms didn't they get a ton of stuff from china you know how hard would it have been for one of the chinese arsenals like arsenal 26 that supplied a tremendous number of guns to simply make 6 000 additional ones and supply them to north vietnam instead of going through all the work of trying to set up a factory and well the answer is as much psychological i think as it is logistical uh first off setting up a substantial factory in north vietnam in north vietnam would have had long-term serious benefits for things like arms repair as well as being able to manufacture arms within the country and save the the risk of having to transport them over borders and you know and across long distances to get into north vietnam beyond that there is this desire for self-sufficiency that i think pretty much every small nation fighting for its own independence really has it it's a matter of national pride to be able to say that hey we made our own weapons we're not totally dependent on china to give us everything that we need i mean maybe they were but they'd like to try and have some some good basis for saying that they weren't and i think that's completely understandable the factory set up to make these was about 12 kilometers north of a a place called yin bay or yin bai which is sort of a north western suburb of hanoi so we're talking basically in the hanoi area production began in 62 production ended in 1965 and by that point the factory still hadn't managed to really get up and running my understanding is they maxed out at about 55 employees which is not 55 workers which is not enough staff to really well to be doing the sort of thing they were expecting which was thousands of rifles per year or hundreds of heavy machine guns per year ultimately they were supposed to have a forging facility barrel manufacturing capacity a lot of elements that never actually got to completion well 1965 rolls around and the us starts a strategic bombing campaign in north vietnam rolling thunder and there's no i don't have any specific data on this but the generally understood outcome is rolling thunder hit factory number one and that cut off production uh in 1965. now chinese would come back and help assist in rebuilding and retooling the factory but it wouldn't be until the late 1970s that it was actually in a position to start manufacturing stuff again so that is why we see uh sks production always relegated to pretty much all chinese parts uh with date codes from 62 only until 65. you'd think hey they could really have used a lot more guns continuing after 65 but they didn't have the capacity to build them because the factory got bombed so that is an overview of the north vietnamese sks these are extremely rare in the us the only ones that came back as i said were war souvenirs brought back by gis from the vietnam war and they are often actually kind of overlooked as chinese guns so there may be more of them floating around than collectors recognize so something to keep an eye out for uh a big thanks to ozark machine gun for loaning me this to show to you guys if you're ever in missouri don't miss the chance to stop by his very cool rental range and check out a wide variety of modern and historical machine guns thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 363,479

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, vietnam, skas, Simonov, rifle, carbine, 7.62x39, nvm, North Vietnam, north Vietnamese, china, Chinese, factory 296, yen bai, yên bái, hanoi, rolling thunder, factory, repair, arsenal, vietnam war, 1965, 1962

Id: E20-m1hbuhk

Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020