Can we just agree on what NOS means please!

If the bike is being built in a factory then the parts and the bike are NOT new old stock. They are new current stock, or simply new.
What happens if the parts are never assembled in the factory, but just sit in the box, along with the frameset, unbuilt, for a couple of decades - only to be built by me, 30 years later? Cos I have one of those.
 
So, let me understand this.

A bike entirely built from new old stock parts, that is never ridden, can only be deemed a new old stock bike if it was the manufacturer (i.e. some minimum wage dude in Taiwan, employed by a third party factory) that bolted all the new parts onto it? If anyone other than this dude in Taiwan does the assembly, of exactly the same, new, parts suddenly it’s…. different?

What you’re describing is a ‘replica’ built with NOS parts. Not a NOS bike.
 
What happens if the parts are never assembled in the factory, but just sit in the box, along with the frameset, unbuilt, for a couple of decades - only to be built by me, 30 years later? Cos I have one of those.

Good grief!

The decades old parts are NOS but as soon as you open packets/boxes and take tools to them, to put them on the bike, they instantly become NEW UNUSED.
 
Seems the practical implication of the term is getting lost in the semantics/pedantics? There’s also often a gulf between the theory and practice -
I’ve collected loads of NOS bits over the years, some of which is quite badly scuffed or ‘shop soiled’ (grrr!). I’ve also a bunch of parts removed from brand new bikes. Many of these are pristine and in better shape than the NOS stuff.

As I can’t always remember the provenance of each part I’ll describe them all as ‘unused’…

I bloody hate shop-soiled, storage-marked NOS bits, and it seems ridiculous to have a ‘superior’ designation of NOS purely on the technicality
 
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Good grief!

The decades old parts are NOS but as soon as you open packets/boxes and take tools to them, to put them on the bike, they instantly become NEW UNUSED.

Technically they have been used, to build a bike.

I think that is where some of the confusion lies, once something is used for a purpose then it is obviously used.
 
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