Well, after all of the 4 pages, I have not seen any decent pictures of Mr. Holland’s Daly and its present/broken stock. Without that, good repair advice is not possible.
Give this man a cigar!
The Charles Daly in question may or may not be repairable, but most everyone is arguing about the high cost of a top quality replacement.
I did roll my eyes recently when someone posted about the six week/1000 coat process of applying stain and an oil finish to a Westley Richards gun, I believe. A couple guys did some math to calculate finish time between coats, and it didn't add up. There would have been scarcely enough time for the coats of finish to even begin to get tacky before any excess was rubbed off, so the claim on their website appeared to be pure advertising hype.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned is that most modern day stockers aren't spending time roughing out a stock from a blank with a hatchet, an adze, and a drawknife. I was a bit surprised to learn some years ago that most factory stocks of mass produced vintage American doubles were roughed out on multi-station duplicators. And we all know the final inletting, checkering, and finish wasn't done to ACGG exhibition quality standards, even on many of their higher grades. I'd bet most one-off stock replacement jobs done today have a large percentage of the work done on a Hoenig or other high precision duplicator. I do understand that good wood is costly, and precision stock duplicating isn't cheap either.
The guys who get several thousand dollars to restock a gun often have multi-year waiting lists, so Capitalism and laws of supply and demand are going to continue to dictate prices. With thirty million illegal aliens here, you'd think we could find a few who can stock guns at cheap prices. I can see the Threads now... my stocker got deported and my gun isn't finished. The OP might be able to have his gun repaired at a much more reasonable cost. He can do as some of us have done, and find a nice blank at a more reasonable price than one of the more expensive wood merchants. As a skilled machinist, he could broaden his horizons and attempt to do it himself, perhaps starting by practicing on some cheaper guns. He might even become damn good at it.
Or he could abandon the project, and sell the gun knowing he might be deep underwater if he hires a top flight stocker to do it. There are options that might make the project more affordable, but it starts by knowing just how bad it is now, along with the condition of the rest of the gun. A broken tomato stake isn't worth the epoxy and a couple reinforcing pins or dowels to fix it.
