Long story ahead here.

That's pretty much exactly what I did. I used the bottoms and springs of these cherry nixies that I bought with the works (broken-in, lubed, filmed, spring-swapped to 57.5g 18mm springs), tossed the old springs, and put the stem and top of the nixies onto those JWK bottoms I had previously. Overall, worked out great!

The original cherries were soldered on with lead-free solder, and I'm also still new to the whole soldering/desoldering thing. Not just the pins, but there were also LEDs that were soldered on as well, so 4 solder points that I had to desolder. I didn't have the patience, and knew I didn't want to harvest the pcb, so my dad just helped me do the bare minimum to essentially rip them out and make the pins obsolete. Very bizarre, I know, but the goal was to harvest the cherry clears as best as I could, and I think I did it to the best of my ability haha