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