Sit tight, and have your tranquilizers ready...

...all you collectors of original firearms!

A friend just lent me a "Home Gunsmithing Digest" from 1970.
Read and enjoy these titles:D

SPORTERIZE THAT LATIN MAUSER:
A step-by-step conversion of a 1909 Peruvian Mauser to a respectable sporter.

REBUILDING THE GI CARBINE:
The ultimate series on how to convert the military carbine into an attractive, worthwhile arm.

SURPLUS TO SPORTER:
The little things make a custom rifle of what was just another military firearm.

(my italics, just to twist the knife in the wound)

Values were different in those days....

When I was a kid, the gun club had a stack of old American gun magazines from the 50's and 60's. Every magazine had at least two articles on some sort of sporterizing.

Frankly, I'm amazed any surplus rifles got out of that era unmolested.

Just goes to show how many of them were out there. Specially the ads showing how to turn an M1 Carbine into a pump, or heavily mod the M1 rifle...I guess the mods were too hard for the average guy though. I did turn a couple of M1 carbines into pumps though. They sure worked neat then. Thing is with our laws it didn't make any difference. They still ended up registered.

Why would you want to convert an M1 into a pump action?

It was a design in a gun digest I had here dating back to the '50's. Here in Canada they've been registered because of the barrel length for years and the only way to de-register them is either to re-barrel them to 19" or make them so they aren't semi. The design had a wrap around walnut pump installed and two bolts tapped into the op handle.

It all became a moot point with the general registry of all long guns. Then they were retuned to semi as they still had to be registered. Then that was dropped and they all came off the registry except things like the M1 carbine...specifically named so it had to be registered...

See, gun laws here don't always make sense. But we can't get into that. That was something I did as a project back in about '89 or '90...