Nil desperandum: do not despair.
Robert0288, there are lots and lots of Bubba's ex-girls around, crying desperately in the various corners and nooks and crannies for someone to buy them, take them home, love them, dress them up and take the out on the town. You can ask Buffdog; I likely have more junk than half the guys here. (Problem is that they have more nice ones than I have! LOL!)
Thing is, it doesn't have to cost a fortune to get started. There are still decent old Lee-Enfields on the go for under a hundred bucks, ones fit for restoration. There are people with parts. There WILL be wood, or so we are told (I need a truckload). The really neat part is that if you hang around in a joint like this, you get to know some really neat people and a lot of them REALLY knows their onions. You can LEARN a LOT here on CGN and I don't think ANYONE here minds if you ask questions.
You're a student, so likely you are out of school right now and working. What you do is each of the next 3 weeks, the weeks of this month, put a $20 and a $5 bill, one of each, into the one book that you will always remember: your Bible. At the end of July, you take all of this out and you have $100. Get on here, or check out your local sporting-goods shop or gun shop and see what they have in the back room in the line of sportered Lee-Enfields. Pick out one that strikes your fancy and has a decent bore, take her home and you are now in the business of being a preserver of your country's heritage. On top of that, you'll be able to go to the range whenever you want to. Learn about handloading, too; it's the cheapest possible way to get GOOD ammo for your shooting and you learn a lot at that, too.
And the most important thing of all is that you'll learn something really important: being a REAL Historian of the hands-on variety is a lot of fun.
And welcome to the club!
That said, it must be pointed out that Buffdog, having lived in Ontario during those years, was uncommonly blessed in some ways. The wages he describes continued, out here on the Prairies, for a decade afterwards. When I started fulltime work outside of a family-owned business (1962) the minimum wage (all that most people got) was 70 cents an hour for a job that you had to turn up for at 5 in the morning. That's $28 a week, gross pay, and from that you had to deduct income taxes (2 kinds, federal and provincial), Unemployment Insurance and medical. That left you about $21 a week for all your work and that $10.66 Number 4 in the hardware store set you back better than half a week's pay. And you still had to have a place to live and you had to eat. Good thing coffee was a dime and you could get a Nip, Chips and Salad for 45 cents. You paid with a green piece of paper and your change didn't go 'klunk' when it hit the counter: 80% silver. A skilled and VERY good Carpenter generally got $1 an hour or less; his helper was lucky to make 75 cents. And fuel, even though the West is where it ALL came from, always cost more out here than it did in Central Canada; they had 29-cent-a-gallon gasoline for years while we drilled for it, pumped it out, refined it and paid 41.9 a gallon.
Just for perspective.
Sometimes I think the Good Old Days are right now. It's just that Mark I Lee-Metfords have just got so SCARY scarce!
