I have been shooting savages for a long time and have been reading the site but never posted before. I am thinking of buying a new 111 trophy hunter xp package and when I looked at them in Cabelas the barrel nut was smooth. Have you guys seen this before? How do you remove the nut to switch the barrels with this kind of nut. I am sure the answer is somewhere on this site but I couldn't find it.
Thanks,
Phil
Yeah.... Great isn't it?
One of the other guys can probably tell you why.
A few weeks ago we did a barrel swap with the smooth nut. It didn't stand a chance against my 16" pipe wrench. Came off happily.
Of course it had become unusable as a barrel nut due to the aesthetics of it but it did make a great little paper weight.
'Scuse me while I whip this out...!
yeah some have smooth barrel nuts, http://www.sharpshootersupply.com/
The easiest way to remove a factory installed barrel nut is with a pipe wrench. Most replace it with the older style slotted Savage barrel nut. Our you can order a smooth barrel nut and use a cheap strap wrench or the more expensive SSS smooth barrel nut wrench. Midway USA and Brownells stock both the smooth and slotted Savage barrel nuts.
There is a possiblity, although slim, that you can remove the smooth barrel nut without marring it up using a pipe wrench and a whole lot of duct tape. If you wrap the tape really tight around the nut until it is maybe 1/4" thick or so, you can still get a good enough bite with the pipe wrench to get it off, and maybe....just maybe not penetrate throught the tape and scuff up the nut. I've taken two of them off myself this way. The first one I didn't use near enough tape and ate the nut up pretty good. The second one was for my father in law...I used more tape but not quite enough and made a couple small marks. He doesn't care, and we just used a sharpy to color them back black. If you mess it up, and don't like it , you can replace with the slotted nut.
If it's a factory installed "tough nut", tape won't keep it from being marred. So you might as well order a new one.
You can also dril/milll a shallow hole or groove into the bottom of the smooth nut and then fabricate a wrench with a pin or protrusion that fits into the hole.
My M10 precision carbine came with a smooth barrel nut. All the new production guns probably do.
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