bedding

[thomae]

Do i(sic) need to sand down the bedding area...?

That would help. You want the bedding material to adhere well to the wood. At a minimum you should clean it with denatured alcohol or some other solvent. Sanding is good to rough up the surface and some folks take a dremel or drill and make holes or grooves in the surface to get a physical lock with the bedding material.

Do i(sic) need to ...remove some material from behind the recoil lug to make room for the bedding first?

My opinion is that this is a matter of choice. Bedding material does not need to take up a lot of room or be very thick to be effective, it is supposed to allow full contact with all the load bearing surfaces of the rifle so that the load can be evenly transferred to the stock. If there is already a little space for the bedding material, it will likely be sufficient, but if you want to remove some material, it won't hurt things. If the recoil lug fit is already very tight, I would take out a bit of material with a dremel tool or something similar. If you don't have a dremel, you can use a small wood chisel, but make sure it is as sharp as you can make it and go very slowly and carefully.

Pillar bedding is not really that hard, I would reconsider if I were you. The pillars allow you to consistently torque the action to the bedded stock and not have the wood of the stock compress under the pressure. I use lamp rod cut to length and do it all in one step similar to the link below. For me, it is not very difficult. (I don't fabricate a separate escutcheon, however)

http://www.6mmbr.com/pillarbedding.html