OK, I'll try to lay out some general things to observe and think about with stock woods:

1. "High figure" wood in stocks is generally weaker than clear, plain grain flows. This is especially true when the figure is in the wrist area of the stock (whether one or two-piece stocks). As an example, look at the grain flow in a military rifle stock (1903/A3 Springfield, Garand or M-14). You'll notice that the grain tends to be rather plain, and it is oriented to flow front-to-back. There's a reason for this - every now and again, military rifles are used as clubs, and they need that stock to hold up to being used as a club. Simple, clean, front-to-back (ie, lengthwise) grain flows give those rifles this ability.

By "figure" I mean the waves, patterns, whorls, etc that you can find in stock wood. This is true for both maple and walnut. Here are examples of common figured wood names:

http://www.continentalhardwood.com/Lumber/FiguredWoods.aspx

Here's an example of the range of figure in gunstock blanks:

https://americanwalnut.com/auto-ou-gunstock-blanks.html

By the way, the finishing method in military stocks that keeps them from drying out over the years is that the whole stock is immersed in "boiled" linseed oil for 24+ hours. Then they pull it out and drained the excess, and then dried the stock. This keeps the wood from becoming brittle.

2. There are a few woods that are used for gunstocks, and maple is one of them. Maple, however, is rarely seen on guns. Why?

Well, because plain maple isn't very interesting, and if you're going to use a plain hardwood for a gunstock and stain it, you might as well use beech or something similar. Beech is cheaper and easier to work.

So this means that the maple you normally see on gunstocks is figured - curly, blanket, and fiddleback are the figures most often used in maple gunstocks.

Ah, but there's an issue with figured maple in making gunstocks: If it is the really nice, rock-hard maple variety, then figured maple is a bear to work with. When you're using gouges to do the inletting and chisels to do the shaping on a high-end custom stock with a highly figured piece of maple, you often find that the grain "lifts" as you're trying to cut it where the grain reverses or changes direction. This means that you have to stop cutting from that direction and come at the issue from another direction, so you can cut the wood as the grain is on a bias away from you.

In mass-produced maple stocks, they use CNC routers and climb-milling to try to do the job, but I'll wager that some of the wood with nicer figure ends up being put into the firewood pile because even with climb milling, it chipped out.

3. If a gun has a stock break in the wrist area, my advice is to not mess with it unless you're a highly experienced woodworker. Put a paper bag around each end of the break and find a gunsmith who does stock work. If a stock breaks once in the grip area, it probably needs to be reinforced to not break again in the grip area.

4. Maple will tend to chip out more than walnut, so the places you need to be careful are when taking the gun apart and putting it back together, the "toe" of the stock (which is the bottom of the butt area - it's called the "toe" because if you have a rifle by your side while standing at parade rest, the bottom of the buttstock is closest to your toes - likewise the top of the butt is known as the "heel"). The toe area of stocks tends to chip on maple stocks even if there is a recoil pad on the gun. This can be repaired by gluing it back on, but NB that it is likely to chip out again on either side of the glue joint.

Maple is a very pretty wood for stocks when it is high-figure maple - blanket, curly, fiddleback, etc. I don't work with maple in my gunstocks, because of the chip-out issue. For my gunstock work, I prefer thin-shelled English walnut, Claro Walnut or even Black Walnut, and then I go looking for figured blanks of English walnut. Sometimes, a blank of English walnut with some figure can cost me $600 (or more, if I were willing to pay it). But we're talking about your gun, so you get what you'd like, and I love the way maple looks on a gunstock. I'd just advise you to treat it gingerly, and not just toss it into the back of the pickup with the dogs and tools. the way you could a 11-87.

Oh - and as for the Winchester 101. Winchester "purists" who want everything to be made in New Haven, CT, grumbled quite noisily about a "Japanese-made shotgun" - distrusting that a company located in a country where there is no gun ownership base, no appreciation for fine guns, etc could make a decent gun. Well, Miroku, who makes the 101 for Winchester (now FN) does a good job. It's quality steel, and good machine work, and it is well supported. The modern ones have chrome-lined chambers and bores, are back-bored, etc. I think they're fine guns. I don't know whether they're using inertia triggers on them now or if they're still mechanical triggers. I prefer mechanical triggers on a O/U shotgun. I am not a fan of the Browning Citori-style inertia trigger system.