It's funny you mention that Surpmil. I was thinking about this idly.....& I remembered years ago seeing a couple of what appeared to be genuine PPCo rifles that had had their bases removed. When we recreate them these days the rifle body is 'kissed' to turn curves into rightangles so as to facilitate fitting the base & collimating the scope with the rifle bore, yet the couple of originals were very crudely done by what looked like hand scraping, no less. I suspect some of the methods used would surprise us...

IIRC (it was only photo's that I saw) one of the rifles lived in Canadaicon...