Very hard to make a call without having the gun in hand. If the gun was a real cherry but for the holes, I might consider the plugging method with screws. But if the holes are numerous and poorly layed out on a gun in not all that uncommon condition, I'd not hesitate to strip the gun down and weld it up and refinish the gun. The really hard call is when the gun is in pretty good original finish condition and the holes are pretty ugly. IMO, the holes already took the collector value out of the game unless this is a historically significant gun. I'm leaning toward a permanent fix by welding/refinish. I bet Ken Hurst's friend at Classic could do a fine job.
