"terryS" ) writes:

Many of the 'chop jobs' done when these receivers were commonly
available (And cheap, sometimes as little as four dollars etc.) were a
shame and substantially reduced their value without improving the
ability of the receiver to work just as well as it did when installed
in an aircraft.

But this is revisionist history.

Nobody has an obligation to keep things intact for some potential
point down the road.

Those things were cheap and plentiful back then. Even in 1972, I could
get a Command Set transmitter for ten dollars, which meant that modifying
it to be a VFO was a far better choice than buying parts and making a VFO.
If you got it for ten dollars, who cares about resale value? Especially
when you could turn around and get another. If they'd carried a higher
price back then, obviously people would have thought twice about it,
because their appeal would be less. But they were so plentiful that they
were practically given away, so it was perfectly fine to do whatever you
wanted to do with them, even if it meant stripping it down and basically
using the chassis and variable capacitor(s) for something drastically
different, like a homebrew receiver or SSB transmitter.

Obviously it's all a different matter, now that they have become scarce.
But it's now over sixty years after WWII ended. And of course, if people
hadn't been making use of them, doing whatever they wanted to do with
them, then the numbers wouldn't have dropped, and while some might consider
them valuable, nobody could get high money for them, because they'd still
be plentiful.

But it's silly today to be critical of what was done to them back then
because things are meant to be used. We bought comic books and read them
and wore them out and threw them out; we didn't keep them in plastic and
never read them. We bought equipment and put it to use, and if things
weren't to our liking, modified them, and if things broke down, they
got fixed and nobody felt a need to keep things exact. And people got
value out of all that surplus equipment that came out of WWII, precisely
because it was cheap and in large quantities. Because things are made
to be used.

Michael VE2BVW