xsquidgator

I recently came into a Chinese Norinco SKS that I'm impatient to try out. It's basically a gift from a family member who hasn't shot in years, who loaned it to one of his friends, and there's no info on it at all, no manual, no papers, nada.

It appeared to me to have never been fired, since I noticed what looked like thick reddish orange grease coating many of the parts and nooks/crannies. I got a decent set of instructions from the web, and today I spent a couple of hours dissassembling and cleaning up every bit of the heavy red grease (cosmoline?) that I could wash out of it. When I took the gas piston apart, there were huge slugs of grease in there. I do want to totally remove this grease, correct? My belief is that the gun's action wouldn't work properly with all that sticky grease in there.

A couple hours later, and I had it cleaned up considerably, with some lube oil in the moving parts where I thought it would need it. Is this the way a gas operated rifle should be kept? I heard you were supposed to remove the cosmoline, which is what I think this gunk was. I can't imagine the vietcong carrying this thing and using it in the jungle while full of sticky grease.