Yugo M48 Markings

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The letters before the serial numbers are a prefix. It is part of the serial number. They would start with 00001 and then work up to 99999. If they needed more numbers, the prefix comes in, A00001-A99999, then B00001-B99999 and so on. Some would start with the A prefix, just depends on the country. Some countries also assign the prefix blocks to certain times or manufacturers so it may not mean that many rifles were produced prior. It isn't real helpful generally to tell when the rifle was made.

In regards to Yugo M48s, it is not a prefix... but a batch number.

They are only present on the first 100,000 M48 rifles, then was dropped and just the numbers were given per model from that point on. The "K" indicates that rifle was in that number batch. From the alphabet in Bogdanovic's book, would seem to be the 13th batch (judging the example he made in the book).

With M48s, they did somewhere around 52,000 to 53,000 rifles in the first year of production (1950). Your serial number works out to 1951 production, which was about 92,000 rifles. There are some discrepancies in the production numbers, which is mentioned in Bogdanovic's book.

My M48A does not have a prefix... and is the 51239 M48A rifle produced. Works out to 1953 production.