SKS triiger guard from hell

[dragonfly22588]

So, I took home the SKS I bought. I disassembled it and tried to put it back together. Everything went fine until I tried to put back the trigger guard. I've watched videos online how to do it and I've been struggling with it for the past 1-2 hours.

First of all yes the safety is engaged as I know this must be in order to get the trigger guard back on. I am very confident that it is assembled in place together. Everytime I try I feel there is some kind of resistance preventing me from snapping the trigger guard back into place. I have tried "slapping" it in hard, I've turned it upside down and placed it on the ground and I tried leveraging my weight and both hands to push the trigger guard in it just won't budge.

Do any of you guys have some idea what I am doing wrong or what is going on here?

I've attached some pictures to show you what I mean.

[BennyAdeline]

rubber mallet will make you smile

[dragonfly22588]

rubber mallet will make you smile

Is that really necessary? I banged on the trigger guard pretty hard. Could there be something else I am doing wrong?

[thetruecheese]

Just hit it with something dude it's made for barely literate conscripts

[dragonfly22588]

I did try to hit it with the butt of another rifle just now and still no go. Something else I tried, I took off the stock to see if it would go on without it and notice the contact point above my finger. There is an overlap of the metal and it seems to be physically constrained. Before you say there looks like there is more room on the left side to push it forward, when I do it just gets stuck, I can't believe what is going on here.

[SkyHawk]

What comes off, must go back on.

[dragonfly22588]

Ok ok guys, I just got the latch on by hitting the trigger guard at a very special angle. Now I have it locked in without the stock. I'm trying to get it off now but now it seems much harder to get it off. Just making sure I should be able to disassemble the trigger guard without the stock right?

[bohoki]

make sure there is not any weird wood chunks causing the receiver assembly from seating correctly

[Gavelek]

The way I'm doing it is by placing a puncher or any metal rod against the guard as close as possible to the spot where it should click, then I punch with hammer, sometimes it goes easy sometimes I have to hit hard several times, if this is no go I guess it's damaged, if you have it out before putting back together, try to work on it; file, sandpaper, lube it, see what happens
What's your location?

[Gavelek]

And put a piece of wood under the stock so it's not resting on sights!

[greensoup]

One of my two Chinese sks rifles had this issue. I used padded bar clamps to squeeze in the trigger.

The length between the contact points for latching are slightly out of sync due to mismatched builds (my guess).

[dragonfly22588]

Well I finally did it. I took the advice to get a rubber mallet and it went through easily. One of the problems I had which I didn't realize until I assembled it with out the stock was that I was applying pressure directly downward when in reality I needed really to push the trigger guard forward and downward. The mallet did the trick. What a ride.

[rivraton]

Is that really necessary? I banged on the trigger guard pretty hard. Could there be something else I am doing wrong?

mallet for normal gun work:


Mallet for SKS work:

[Calico1404]

Mallet to get it in, mallet and phillips screw driver to get it out. Done.

[beerman]

Some SKS trigger fits are very stiff. A dab of grease on the post helps a lot.