Glad to hear you got it sorted out! I'll add my stuff below just in case somebody else gets one of these and finds the same issue. I mostly used a dremel and a metal grinding bit which I found worked very well, despite it not being for this purpose. Other tools included various sized chisels, files/rasps of various sizes, and a belt sander.
Ok, have a bit of time now to elaborate... here is a picture of the finished product to maybe give you some motivation lol
Here are a few images of areas I removed. The worst spots were at the rear of the receiver on the little foot where the rear-most screw goes, the front curvature of the magazine well, and the area above and through the recoil lug. These areas are the ones where I removed the roughly 1/2" material. The roughness/chatter was cleaned up later, but here is before I did so:
I had similar issues with fitting the magazine well/trigger guard and ended up lengthening that area forward and recontouring the bottom of the stock. The forend also needed some recontouring to fit the reproduction front band I used, and had to remove material on the handguard front end, and inside the belly of the stock to allow the cleaning rod to line up properly with the cleaning rod catch. I also had to drill the hole for the front band spring.
IMPORTANT TO NOTE: Although my rifle originally had the recoil lug laying flat in the stock, I had to orient the recoil lug vertically in order for the bearing surfaces to work. It wasn't correct to the manufacturer, but it is something that was done. Otherwise, the recoil lug position would be too far forward to allow the action to sit in the stock. I figured this was easier than cutting in a new recoil lug position and filling in the old one, which wouldn't have looked very pretty. Another important thing... the wood used seemed to still be "green". Because I removed the finish and then used a campfire to add some artificial aging/darkening to the stock imitating old oil stains and to bring out the grain pattern, the stock actually shrunk and shortened slightly. Then I had to lengthen the magazine well again. I guess I basically kiln dried it at that point.
Anywho, I still need to do some patchwork around the recoil lug were I re-cut the channel inside the circle since I changed the orientation of the lug flat. It looks like a + sign at this time as shown above. Otherwise, I think it works pretty good. I think I only paid around $130 for my stock, so I didn't mind having to do a little legwork. If any of this is unclear or you want me to address further, please let me know!
