Wouldn't want to forget one other little thing here. Noticed Jimmy plugged his old pad holes with dowel. Lot of things can happen with a plug both softer(white pine whittled) or harder (birch dowel). Unless the old pad was mounted way off the vertical centerline, your new centers are going to be on the same line vertically. And maybe they won't be even an entire hole dia. off the old. So you drill a couple pilot holes for the screws and the twist drill pulls into the plugged hole. You drive in the screws and a pad that perfectly mated with the butt is suddenly bucking up in the middle. I think that means the screws centers are effectively too far apart because of the nature of the plugging. Pan head screw going in at angle and bearing only at the top of top hole and bottom of bottom. Or conversely holes are effectivley too close together; screws go in crooked and bear only on the bottom edge of top hole and top edge of bottom and the toe and heel kick up. I've had this scenario happen and no amt. of surfacing of the butt or the pad by any means will defeat this distortion. Only solution is to leave screws loose and bang the pad around with the heel of your hand to keep it correctly registered, or make darn sure those screw pilot holes and on the correct centers and not travelling. And I don't have any problems shooting the butt of a stock (or the bottom of a pad similarly) with a long sanding block with a 3 by 24 belt stretched on it and achieving a single plane end to end and laterally, but will admit that any "self-jigging" tool (which a sanding block is) will not automatically correct to the pitch you want and also create an equal angle to the broad faces unless that's pretty much what you have already or you work down to a scribe line. I have nothing against chop saws, radial arms, and table saws; spent 36 yrs. alongside these blades and lost the hearing in my right ear to them; it's the way some people are going to use them (without enuf experience to have the tune in their head) that offends my sense of survival. Put that in your personal archive as a sort of "I told you so" for the unwary. You have the right to screw up your pretty wood, or worse, your body parts any way you want; it doesn't mean you MUST!
jack
