I got annoyed with the fact that I could "un-boil" a piece of leather armor, or somehow peel the paint off of metal armor, and then still have both the original armor and the fancy mod that it was carrying, but when it came to weapons, I had to go scrounging for parts just to unscrew the silencer off of a pistol (which you can usually do with bare hands and no tools IRL), or to take the scope off of a lowly pipe pistol (seriously?  There's just a screw holding it on...)

This mod removes ALL of that - if you're pulling upgrade parts off of a weapon, then you're free to do so without cost, you just have to downgrade the part to whatever "standard" mod that fits in that mod slot.

Part of the reason I made this mod is so that I can "break down" all the weapons we loot - we're sitting at the machining bench in the gas station, which in-lore is specifically made for re-tooling the parts for atomic cars... I figure if it can handle atomic cars, then it's probably got all the teensy screwdrivers and pliers that would be needed to take apart a 10mm pistol or an assault rifle, and I shouldn't need a handful of spare steel bits to do it.  I'm all for needing spare adhesive and springs to upgrade a gun, but for stripping it down to bits, there's literally no call for it.
 
If I were personally sitting at a "repair bench" with a half-dozen pipe pistols and rifles that I was breaking down into parts to make one good high-end gun (the good scope from the one I just found, the calibrated receiver from this one I got from that raider up at Olivia, the silencer from the one I picked up off of a vendor, and the good grip that's on my old one) I'm damn sure not going to take them all apart, put the good bits onto my new gun, and then re-build all of them with what's left - I'll build my new fancy gun, and then I'll put all the useful spare bits in a box labeled "Pipe Pistol parts", and then what's left will get melted down into "steel" for building settlements and such... if it's a couple Gatlings that I'm working with, then I'd likely build the new one, and put any scraps back together as best I can and vendor the bloody thing or give it to Strong to shoot mole rats with when he's bored - regardless, I can't think of a reason I'd ever actually want the second one, especially considering the weight.
 
With fairly limited exceptions, there's not much reason for us to carry more than 2 of any particular weapon "type", especially later in the game - we'll build a specific weapon for a specific purpose, and everything else goes into the scrap heap or gets sold.

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### Updates!
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v1.3 Changes
Built an installer and many many combined versions, so that people only have to run a single esp no matter what version they choose (except the component versions).  This is likely to be the last version unless there's bugfixes related to the installer or the Nuka-World DLC.  All of the downloads except for the AIO installer have been deprecated, however they obviously all still work - version updates for the past few months have just been DLC additions.

v1.2.2 Changes
Added Nuka-World DLC weapons to the mod.

v1.2.1 Changes
Added Far Harbor DLC weapons to the mod.

v1.2 Changes

1.) "Realism" version added - listed as "componentized" in the downloads section, I've split up all the weapon mods into their categories - if you want only the ironsights to be a free swap, now you can do it.  The zipfile contains all of the component esp's - you can use as many or as few of them as you wish.

2.) "Stubs" versions added - I've added a version where the stub barrel for the Pipe pistol and the "short" barrel for the 10mm pistols are free, instead of the ones that are normally marked as "standard".  Do not use both the Stubs and Regular versions at the same time, just install one or the other.

3.) "No-Profits" version added - same basic mod as the default one, except all of the standard parts have no value.  There's a version for both the stubs and standard edition.  Do not use a "no profits" version with any of the other versions, they will not work in tandem with one another.

4.) All versions contain the "bugfixes" that I added in version 1.1, even the realism minipacks.  I've also standardized some of the loose mod names - there were a few that were just listed with names like "Short Stock", which I renamed to be "Hunting Rifle Short Stock", so it sorts in the inventory list properly.


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v1.1 Changes

1.)  Rebuilt with FO4Edit instead of FO4Snip - no more worrying about corrupted saves!

2.)  Added in all the remaining weapons I'd missed the first time around.

3.)  I've put back in three broken mods from vanilla - the "Tuned" receiver for the Pipe Revolver, and the "Glow Front Sight Ring" for the Combat Rifle and Combat Shotgun.  These three mods presently sit at the top of their respective lists, show no materials, and won't allow you to put them onto a gun.

For some reason, the three missing recipes hadn't made it into the final game, even though the actual mod item and weapon upgrade data did - there was even a mysterious 1-digit gap in the formID list where all three of them should have been.  I added the recipes, and balanced the required materials to be realistically in between the recipes directly above and below them.  For those that care about such things, I've used the missing values in the formID list for all three recipes.

Note :  Because there's no crafting items used in the downgrade, you no longer gain XP for downgrading - I was hoping that would happen, and lucked out that it did.

Note :  Because there's no crafting items in the "standard" parts lists anymore, a weapon that you've stripped down to standard pieces will no longer give you much in the way of components via the "Scrapper" perk - you can work around that by disabling the mod when it comes time to scrap a pile of weapons, or you can just call it an even trade, because you're saving a ton of components using this mod in the first place.  I -DO NOT- consider this to be broken functionality, and will not work towards "fixing" it.

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Install using NMM, or download manually, unzip, and drop the .esp into your Fallout4\Data folder.

To uninstall, just delete the "free_downgrades.esp"