Mark,
Take a good hard look at most pillars that are contoured to match a receiver. The one's I've seen have a rather poor surface finish at this point of contact. That and they aren't always accurate in the radius. This tells me you either have two points of contact at the edges or a single point at the center. Either way your asking a material to yield to another material. Some guys try to make up for this by allowing a thin layer of resin to squish between the stock pillar and action but what ends up happening in most cases? The thick goo of wax used as a release penetrates the resin and inhibits good adhesion. The resin then begins to flake off the pillars. I chose to go the other way by accentuating the amount of resin. It keeps the pillar surface away from the stock so that a .050" thick layer of bedding can take up some of the compression load. The rib down the center takes on the task of resisting any compression. A 1/4-28 fastener isn't going to develop enough tensile load to yield a .125" wide strip of stainless steel that is closely contoured to an action.
The whole idea with bedding is a tension free environment inert to ambient condition changes. The pillars job is to avoid crushing fibers in the stock from the tensile load applied by the screws. That's it.
My pillars have the small rib in the center because it actually allows bedding to match this radius for me. The small point of contact is more than enough to thwart off any distortion caused by the screw loads. All this works together to get a pretty fair mirror image representation of the receiver when it's cast in resin. That's really all were doing here. Making a precision casting of the receiver's outside contour.
The REAL feature with this pillar is the fact that when properly installed it virtually guarantees that the action and barrel are resting exactly on their radius and the stock's "water line". Meaning it's a half in/half out relationship.
No more barreled actions that either point up, down, or sit above/below the stock line.
I've posted quite a few redundant pictures of my bedding jobs, here is another showing all this stuff in a finished state. The bore is enlarged to ensure the screws don't act as recoil lugs. A guy has to engineer some clearances in the right spot on a rifle. Especially with repeaters and when dealing with the transmission of recoil. The stock doesn't absorb recoil. Least it shouldn't really. It transmits it to your shoulder via the recoil lug. The path the recoil takes goes right down the sides of the stock to the grip and then out the back to your body. The sides of the stock are where some of that energy is lost. They spread slightly which means the action continues to move to the rear at a slightly different rate than the stock itself does. Guard screw holes, tangs, and bolt handles need to be tailored accordingly or accuracy will suffer.
It's why single shots are so much simpler to build and probably why they have this mystical reputation for being so much more accurate. I seriously doubt its because of rigidity because a properly built repeater will run right next to a single shot all day long. Too many 700's and P64's on the firing lines at Camp Perry to really dispute this.
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