I feel comfortable working on some rifles and I have a MRC Lott I would like to toy around with (after it comes back with the correct barrel). When I was a Remington freak I would work the bolt through the action with different grits of polishing compounds to get it working smoother.
How would one go about smoothing up an action such as the MRC?

Pretty much the same. One of the bigger areas I've found for drag is the collar holding the extractor on my MKXs.

This is not my information, but was rather told to me by a gunsmith friend of mine.

If you have rough spots or the action isn't working as smoothly as you would like, its obviously going to be in those areas where you have metal contact.

So what he recommended was to use Dykem layout blue or red or whatever you have. You put it all over the bolt and then you cycle the bolt. Where the Dykem rubs off you know that is any area that you need to either stone or polish or both.