Milsurp After Hours

Picked this one up off an on line auction about a week ago, a typical SCW rifle with a motley collection of parts from other donor rifles, but I liked the Spanish made replacement handguard and front sight.

Is the "Made in USSR" stamp an import mark, otherwise why is it in English??
It is another nice rifle, you must have quite a collection by now.....

Does that mean that the rifle was imported before 1992? Or.. did the importers not know what to call Russia now?
Mine all just have "Russia" as import information. But .. post 1992.

Niner Delta wrote:Is the "Made in USSR" stamp an import mark, otherwise why is it in English??
It is another nice rifle, you must have quite a collection by now.....

These rifles where imported pre 1968 import regs for import stamping, most Spanish Civil War ( not all but a large number) rifles had these stamps on them depending on the original country of origin, Russian rifles had made in USSR or URRS, Italian rifles where stamped "made in Italy" , French rifles where stamped " made in France, ect. There are several stories as to why this was done but the 2 most popular was

(1) it was a requirement of Spain when they sold these off in the 50's to the US market, and the other

(2) has to do with the importer of many of these, Sam Cummings of Interarms stamping them to help prevent owners from putting the wrong ammo into rifles, ie, 7.62x54 vs 7.62x52, 6.5mm cacarno with all the other 6.5mm, ect.

I personally buy the 2nd theory since they appear on rifles that at the time took a very "non-standard" ammo. I have never seen those stampings on German K98's or Polish K98's since they both take std 8mm ammo