I have posted this before; I have bent thousands of pieces of wood while bow making, probably more.
Don't try to bend your wood without heat, it might snap. Steam is unnecessary, dry heat works better on dry wood.
Here is what I did on my Hanes rifle, the pre-carve that was shipped back to me from the P place without the barrel (they found it later and returned it to me), the forearm had a 20 degree bend downward.
I heated the barrel with a propane torch to the point I could only hold my fingers on it for a few seconds. I inserted the barrel in the inlet in the straight part, heated the bent forearm with a heat gun until I could feel the wood start move with moderate hand pressure. I kept heating the forearm and forestock then pushed the bent part slowly back into place until I could get all of the barrel back in the channel. Don't get in a hurry and keep your heat gun moving so you don't scorch the wood.
When the barrel is back in the inlet put a bunch of zip ties up and down the barrel to keep everything pressed into place. After everything is zip tied, keep heating the barrel and forearm until they are very hot to the touch, a 3 second finger hold, then wrap everything up with old tee shirts to hold the heat in longer. Let everything cool naturally and remove the zip ties, your stock should be good to go.
In a previous post like this I said "wrap the tee shirts around the stock and barrel and let it soak", Some guy was really perplexed by my choice of words and said "what do you mean by let it soak? I worked in a power plant where we often preheated large rotating machinery like turbines and let the heat "soak in' before we put said machinery back into service or it would be out of balance.
When you heat wood, it may feel hot on the surface but needs some time to soak in and change the ligons in the wood to the new configuration. The tee shirt insulation lets the heat "soak" in.
