Under the tang and the flat behind the recoil lug the idea being to provide a large contact area for the receiver when the action screws get torqued. Big contact patch, lotsa friction, things don't move. Back of the recoil lug, back ONLY, after relieving plenty of wood. The idea being recoil forces get spread evenly across the width of the recoil lug. No hotspots or stress risers to split the wood. About an inch and a half of the barrel or so for no other reason than it feels right. Action/barrel is free floated everywhere else. Be sure to leave a little space at the back of the tang. You see lots of cracks there particularly as the inletting shrinks over time. This is easy to do in one step.

You could pillar bed, I do sometimes, but I'm not convinced it helps much for a sporting rifle.

Overall the idea is to bed only where needed. And that's where the force of recoil couples to the stock. Contact anywhere else just adds another variable you don't need.

You may want contact between the barrel and the stock in the form of a pad near the end of the forearm. Can tame barrels that weren't completely stress relieved or don't like your load. But that's for later.

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I run plenty of grease into that front action bolt hole with a Q-Tip and more grease on the bolt threads and never had a problem. Have had to use a bottoming tap to clean out epoxy when I got sloppy but that's no big deal. I use stockmaker's screws to loosely hold the action where I want it to be in the stock, barely finger tight. Action screws work too. You want the action to rest squarely and gently on the epoxy pads you are making.



The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh

Which explains a lot.