Bought a factory Savage varmint weight barrel on eBay. It came in yesterday; I already had the old barrel removed from my action and had that all cleaned up; old barrel had the smooth barrel nut, so I used the pipe wrench to remove it. All went well with that until I had to clamp the old barrel in my shop vise to get the smooth barrel nut off with the pipe wrench it was so tight.

For the replacement barrel I used a standard barrel nut I had on hand. NOW the start of REAL problems. The nut would NOT screw all the way on the barrel. It would go on about 1/4" and then seize up? I tried the smooth nut too; it would not go on either w/o using the pipe wrench. The new replacement barrel would not screw into the action w/o jamming up right near the front scope base screw and will not move any further w/o using a lot of force. I've checked the action and barrel threads closely and cannot see any damage to the threads. What really blew me away was the OLD barrel will no longer thread back in and jams up just like the replacement barrel.

My question to Dave or anyone else is, what course of action is there to fix this (if any). Could the old smooth nut have caused all the problems? In 15 years of rebarreling Savages I've never run into this. I'm totally stumped.