OP, it is truly a blessing to be granted 20-20 hindsight.
As mentioned by stencollector, if none of those rifles had been altered, they would either all have gone to the smelters or still just be worth their weight as scrap metal.
Back in the fifties, sixties, seventies and early eighties, there were several cottage businesses that employed hundreds of people in North America alone. Right up to the early eighties you could walk into any hardware store, rural gas station, farm implement store, some grocery stores and most second hand/pawn shops and you would find surplus rifles for sale. Some were as close to junk as it gets and some were still new in grease.
Back in 1970, I bought a part pallet of No4 MkI Lee Enfields. There were British, US and Canadian rifles on the pallet. I don't remember where they came from anymore but they had been stacked with heavy cardboard spacers between the layers of 13 per tier and the rifles on the edge, where the steel banding was passed over had extra heavy pads under the bands. There were ten tiers of rifles left of a pallet of 15 tiers. I bought these rifles from Ed Karrer in the US. He loaded them into the back of my pick up with an old farm tractor that had forks on the hydraulic boom. I paid him the princely sum of $200 for all of them. The 303 cal No4s were not popular in the US at that time. All were in VG or better condition.
In Canada, Sears, Marshall Wells, Eatons, Army & Navy, SIR etc offered them for $10 ea issued in barrels or $15 ea new in grease. Allan Lever would sell them to me cheaper than that if I bought them by the dozen and cheaper yet by the gross pack of one hundred. Still, around $7 per rifle.
Very few people wanted a full dress battle rifle in those days. There was a stigma attached to them as they were considered to be "battle rifles."
I brought the rifles back across the border without a batted eyelash from the Customs people. I paid my ten dollar customs fee and went home. All of these rifles had been floated in grease. I had an old iron bath tub for just this purpose. Filled it half full of water and set a fire burning underneath it. Lowered a basket with 20 rifles into the boiling water and let them soak for 15 minutes. Pretty soon 99% if the cosmoline floated to the top and It was easily skimmed off and put into a 5 gallon pail for later use.
This process was repeated until all of the rifles were cleaned and stored in the barn. They needed to be covered with a tarp or they would quickly rust. Every night after work, I would strip a dozen rifles of their front end furniture. The parts were all saved and later, many years later, traded off as the full dress rifles started to become popular again. The fore ends were marked with serial numbers using grease pencils so they could go back onto the rifles they came from. Then, they were cut off with a good hand saw to sporting length. A couple of passes over a belt sander, then a few smears with the cosmoline left over and you had a pretty decent sporting rifle. At least all of mine still had the King Screw spacers left in them. Way to many nimrods used to throw them away.
Believe it or not, this actually ADDED value to these fine rifles and enabled a lot of people that otherwise couldn't afford to buy a commercial rifle, to have a powerful rifle to hunt with. I charged $20 per rifle. That was cheaper than the commercially sportered rifles from the commercial vendors of the time for similar rifles. In a very short time, the rifles would sell and I would look for another lot. P14s, P17s, Krags, No1s, No4s, Mausers of all types etc. I stayed away from the Carcanos, Arisakas, Beaumonts, French offerings and Mosins. They were just to difficult to get ammo for and many considered them to be fugly.
If it weren't for those cheap plentiful milsurps, we very likely would not see the enthusiasts of shooting/hunting we see today. Look at the SKS/CZ858/Mosins. They have enabled a lot of new shooters that couldn't otherwise afford to get into the sport to do so.
Thank your lucky stars for those sporters. Many of them make fine hunting rifles at reasonable entry level prices even today. Bubba did us a big favor in his zeal to turn what was considered to be sows ears into silk purses. Some of them were turned into works of art.
