TexasCHLforum.com

Well my tooling experience with firearms has always been a learning process, but the other day when my Yugo SKS 59/66 arrived, I had to get to work. I got it a bit cheaper since the safety catch spring was missing, but a replacement was included. All I had to do was install it! When a friend and I got to work, we didn't realize one important thing - you need to use a "starter" punch or center punch to get pins moving BEFORE using a regular punch. With the trigger assembly sitting before us, we tried as best we could to get the pins out - fifty years of sitting in the firearm had made them tough as nails. We even designed a little contraption out of wood that would keep the 3/32 punch on center while we hammered into it to get the pin out. Well, the first pin eventually came out - after about an hour. Once we extracted the pin from the wood, we came to see it was BENT! Plus all that hammering made the whole assembly rather awkward - all of this could be avoided if we started with the center punch, which apparently is common knowledge and thus made me feel like a fool.

LESSON: DO NOT start pushing out fifty-year old pins from a collectible rifle using a regular punch - USE THE STARTER / CENTER PUNCH! Tsk tsk for me...