Is there a real benefit to getting a premium barrel nut such as Northland's 'squared and trued' unit? It will be for a target/competition rig.
http://northlandshooterssupply.com/n...ed-components/
I have a Criterion barrel and a precision ground recoil lug, but a factory nut. If beneficial, I'll bite the bullet and order one up. This project is nickel and diming me to death!
.... Well... Think of how many people "heard" how fantabulous Savages shoot. All done with "crappy" factory nuts... It is a jam nut, to keep the barrel from moving and changing headspace. Do you think it matters? If so buy, then buy one.
You thought the recoil lug mattered, so maybe the nut matters for your application.
I'm a firm believer in the theory that if it bleeds, I can kill it.
In your experience darker is it worth the extra cost?
There's nothing bad about the factory nuts.......if you knew how they were made, you'd know that they can't be anything but square.
"As long as there's lead in the air....there's still hope.."
Personally, no.
It is a jam nut, that's all.
I need it to maintain the position of the barrel, relative to the receiver. If the factory nut can accomplish this task, while only using (for the sake of argument) 20% shoulder contact; I fail to see the rationale for a 98% contact nut.
Sex appeal and necessity are two different things. Do you want a sexy magic nut that was sent down from heaven? Maybe you do. But the question of do you "need it". That answer is absolutely not.
Fashion Vs. Function. Neither is the "wrong" choice, but be honest about what it is you are choosing.
My $0.02
... and there is 2 K's in Darkker
Last edited by darkker; 09-09-2014 at 09:42 AM.
I'm a firm believer in the theory that if it bleeds, I can kill it.
Thanx.
Auto corect
personally when i when i built my 260 i went with the lug and the nut and the reason being is after removing the factory barrel and seeing how tight the factory put the nuts on and knowing that im going to reinstall the nut at 25ins lbs my thought was the more nut contact the better...now does it matter? maybe not but im a firm believer that the truer a mating surface is the better...if your rebarreling or doing a custom build why use a factory nut that a gorilla tightened? plus you bought a nice barrel and the lug why not the nut to finish it off?...you can get nuts from mcgowen as well that are pretty nice and a little cheaper.
In this order of necessity Barrel, recoil lug, barrel nut,
Dean
RUMs are like woman in Stiletto heals, you know they are going to put you in the poor house, but that has never stopped anyone from pursuing them.
Ditto for my 260, I could see uneven marks on the new savage nut I initially used.Originally Posted by LongRange
Several shooters have asked me that very question. When you remove the factory barrel nut you can look at the contact surface and see for yourself how uniform they are. If the barrel nut does not sit square the internal threads that engage the barrel will not allow the barrel to sit square either. Almost every Gunsmith that I know offers some sort of a squaring and trueing on the barrel nut along with a precision ground recoil lug. The more you can align your barrel and action the better most rifles will shoot.
Their have been several posts where shooters have received new rifles from Savage only to see several inches of scope windage or elevation required to get them close to dialed in. A lot of these rifles were corrected by swapping out the factory parts for those parts that were more precise. There have been several posts on here as well as on Accurate Shooters discussing this in detail.
Jim Briggs
NSS
Thanks for all the replies!
So tell us how they are made. What about their process makes them inherently square?
"Muzzle velocity is a depreciating asset, not unlike a new car, but BC, like diamonds, is forever."-German A. Salazar
Having been heavily involved in the QC labs of several aerospace machining firms I can tell you that if a part, any part, is made on a machine, any machine, then there is always a chance that the part will be wrong.
Whether these are made on screw machines, CNC lathes with live tooling, manual lathes, or 8 axis vertical machining centers costing a million bucks each there will be parts made that are not within the tolerances allowed.
No machining method known to man is utterly perfect all the time.
If I were to use a factory nut I'd screw it onto a precisely made mandrel placed between centers on my lathe and face both ends of the nut to ensure that they were square to the threads within .0001" or so. If the mandrel was already made the entire process would be completed in under 10 minutes.
Thery are made on a bar fed cnc lathe. A bar feeder pushes stock through the headstock of the lathe. The tools do all of the work as it is held in a rotary collet, so all of the operations are done in one fixturing. There are bored, threaded, faced, contoured and milled before they are cut off. A secondary axis picks off the part and deburrs the tapered end.
So the business end is always square with the threads. You may notice on some that there are some minute burrs left from the slot milling operation on the face, but that can be remedied quick with a couple of swipes on a stone.
"As long as there's lead in the air....there's still hope.."
Don't forget the receiver ring while you're at it!
Each morning eat a live green toad, it will be the worst thing you'll have face all day.
As I expected they were.
I've rejected countless parts made precisely like this using some of the finest European and Japanese live tooling, bar fed CNC lathes.
They can, and do, make out of tolerance parts. With the modern CNC lathes an operator can make a BUNCH of out of tolerance parts very rapidly.
Don't forget the receiver ring while you're at it!
No question!
A perfectly made nut is no good if the face of the receiver ring is not square as well.
So why would you think Jim's nuts are made any different?
"As long as there's lead in the air....there's still hope.."
I did not imply that they were.
There are ways to make a part such as this perfect within a tenth or better but the methods are either slow and laborious or very fast but with 100% inspection.
Neither is a viable option in a production environment.
It may however be perfectly viable given the small quantities made for Jim.
Last edited by Savage6x284; 09-11-2014 at 12:22 AM.
.... Are you implying that the barrel nut not being square can somehow, pull the barrel sideways in the receiver? But won't need the threads or bore then fixed, if you buy a squared nut??
If the customer needs a bunch of windage to get his scope on, either the scope mounts are drilled out of alignment, or the rings are off. If it was the barrel pulled out of alignment from the receiver, you now have a stretched receiver bore. A squared nut doesn't fix that.
I'm a firm believer in the theory that if it bleeds, I can kill it.
I'm not Jim but even if the barrel nut face was .020" off of perpendicular to an axis drawn through the center of the nut it would not generate enough force to stretch or otherwise damage the heat treated receiver ring.
Such a deviation from perpendicular would however set up uneven tension and stresses which would affect the vibration pattern of the barrel with potential adverse consequences for accuracy.
Ideally you want everything making up the barrel/receiver ring/barrel nut interface to be as perfect as possible so as to set up even pressure 360* around the barrel. This will allow the barrel to vibrate (whip) at it's natural frequency without any influence from the nut.
Very well put and exactly right...if barrel harmonics are interfered with in any way it will affect accuracy. When I re-barreled my 300 I put the factory brake back on and it would not shoot for crap so I put my jp enterprise recoil eliminator on and it shot bug holes....difference being the factory brake is 16.5oz the jp is just under 6oz
I have no problem with arguing the merits of uneven stresses. But I take exception to the notion that the barrel suddenly can't be square in the receiver, as was stated, save with a squared nut.
As to the original question of "importance". It stuns me still how a $250-$400 Savage with all it's poorly squared faces can shoot so good, and not require $500-1,000 to work right; So much so that the popularity increases to the point that the same Savage is now costing $600-800, suddenly we "Need" parts, just to be able to Mount our scopes....
As I said before, I have no issue with fashion, just call it what it is.
I'm a firm believer in the theory that if it bleeds, I can kill it.
Darkker, are you sure you're not just nit-picking another's technical explanation / justification for trued parts that are designed to reduce the possibility of stress at the point of joining those parts?
If I am going to put the expense and the effort into replacing a barrel, I sure don't see why I would not want to go ahead and replace the lug and nut. It's obviously not absolutely necessary (the nut), but it isn't gonna hurt anything to do so, either. I'll be danged if I'm gonna be talked into or bullied into "admitting" I do anything just for aesthetics or fashion... I may be a gullible dumb-#%%, but I sure as heck am not vain! :)
I don't believe that anyone claimed that Savage rifles were "poorly squared". On the contrary, Fred noted that the method by which the barrel nut is manufactured virtually ensures them to be square with the bore axis.
No other part of the Savage action was claimed to be consistently and egregiously out of perpendicularity (square if you will) either.
Jim may have used the phrasing he used to point out a worst case scenario. I do not know.
I bought my first new Savage 110 series rifle in the mid '80s or thereabout. I'm pretty certain that it cost me more than $250 for that bottom of the line 110. That, say $300, is the equivalent of $672 in 2014. It seems to me that the price for Savage rifles has pretty faithfully tracked the rate of inflation and have not been increased due to greater demand.
To your point about being "stunned" that inexpensive Savage rifles shoot so well given their prices I would say that the lowish prices are more likely due to the $6 IM stocks and a mechanical design which lends itself to easy and rapid production of parts using automated means and inexpensive, readily available raw materials. Steel tubing rather than an expensive and much more labor intensive forging for the bolt body as an example.
Another very large factor in keeping the costs low and the quality high is the incredible advances in machine tool technology within the last 30 years or so. IIRC Savage did a major retooling of their plant at least once during these 30 years. Old and worn machinery was replaced by new machinery which was both FAR more productive and capable of significantly greater precision.
A sound Nick Brewer design coupled with much faster, more accurate machine tools means higher productivity. The decision Savage made to stick with button rifling and hand straightened barrels means that the most significant source of the renowned Savage accuracy is still maintained.
A trued barrel nut is a rather insignificant expense when placed in the context of the overall cost of a custom build and may enter the realm of "why not"
If I were to build a nutted Savage there would be no question that a 10 minute stint on the lathe to true up the nut would be done as a matter of course.
Finally, a rather large part of the appeal of Savage rifles is that they are among the easiest rifles for a gunowner to modify. Most are justifiably proud of their efforts and the $40 spent on a trued nut is insignificant if for no other reason that knowing the job was "done right".
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