The Type 56 is a pleasant rifle.
My introduction to the SKS was from playing DayZ Standalone v0.33 in 2014. A buddy and I would hop on the game every night after school and stay up way too late running around to get good gear. We heard that there was this new semi-automatic rifle that held ten rounds, not the thirty of the M4 but still respectable, and had a decent damage stat. We seeked it out, we found it, and we both thought it was really cool! I watched some youtube videos about the thing, thought it was even cooler, and pretty much wanted the real deal from that moment on.
By the time I was able to buy my own rifles, SKS prices were creeping high. I want to say a Type 56 was averaging something like $500 in good shape, $350-400 a little beat up? We went to the local Gander Mountain not long before they closed down in late-2019. They had one with a $650 pricetag hanging off the trigger guard. That felt like a lot so I didn't even consider the thing.
In 2023 I was walking around this one gun shop with some buddies when I saw another Type 56, some '77 produced rifle that looked a little dinged up but pretty alright. $550! Nope, I didn't want to spend more than $400.
I was just about giving up hope that I'd own some sort of SKS at a "reasonable price", I figured ARs and some AKs are cheaper now so I'd just be happy with those, until a coworker mentioned to me that he had one to sell. I asked for a price, he said $500. I asked if it was just the rifle, he said it would come with a bunch of strip clips and a few hundred rounds of ammo. I did the math on the ammo/strip/accessory price and it basically came out to a $300 rifle, a price that I wasn't against.
Isn't that thing pretty? It's a little dinged up but that's okay, we'll call it character! It's a /26\ from somewhere a bit after the middle of the 1966 production year run, I think the number for total rifles made that year was 525,570 according to a website dedicated to the Chinese SKS.
The gun is damn fun to take out. There's some recoil but it feels quite slow and soft compared to lots of things I've shot. The sight picture ain't too bad, I just keep it on the "battle" notch and follow the "6-o-clock below the belt buckle means you'll hit the torso area" rule at the hundred-yard range. Feeding in strips is a lot of fun, it's impressive how smoothly rounds feed down into the magazine. The thing also just sounds neat when it fires!
My one complaint with the rifle is something that I've heard from a lot of people before me, that's that the trigger is quite sloppy. I'm pretty used to nice triggers in my rifles, almost everything I own is a single-stage trigger in that 4.5-6lb range. This thing has a bunch of creep, then it gets a little heavy, then it goes bang without any sort of "wall". Will it take some time to get used to? Sure. Do I mind? Nah.
I'm glad that I own this and I hope to keep it working for years to come.