Buy the rifle not the story!!!!!

[Colonel Enfield]

I think all this has touched on a salient question, namely - at what point does it stop being a "refurbishment" and start being a "parts gun"?

Parts guns have their place, especially if the owner is fully aware of its status - but I also worry that 20-odd years down the track guns like that are going to end up on the market as "arsenal rebuilds"; not due to any deliberately misleading conduct but just because someone will come across an old rifle with a series of parts from different eras ("That's definitely not a WWII barrel and there's no way that wood is that old either, but the action says 1942...") and conclude that, well, obviously as parts wore out they were replaced - but without realising it was done (by a previous owner and not the military) 75 years after WWII ended, not 75 months.