RRA LAR-8 Barrel Nut

[yesterdayze]

Happy New Years (still the first week for another day ) everyong! My name is Jason, I am new to this forum but have skulked the threads for a bit. I live in Vermont where we have some of the most constituitional gun laws around thank God!

I have responsibly owned guns for years and just recently picked up an RRA LAR-8 .308 standard A4 (flat top). I am a bit newer to the AR side of things as I was a handgun guy most of my life with a smattering of old school rifles here and there. I have certainly shot ARs at the range enough times; just didn't own one before.

I've read the 'before you post' and I have looked around a good bit and seem to find a lot of conflicting opinions and am hoping someone can give me some insight - and if I did miss a thread answering this feel free to scold me I looked but couldn't find any strong indicators or stickies...

The rifle I purchased came with the run of the mill plastic forward hand-guard and delta ring. I found the RRA advanced 1/2 quad hand-guard at my local shop and purchased it. When I changed it over I was able to use a standard ar15 armorers tool to get disassemble everything. The barrel nut from the factory came loose with a single light tap on the wrench and then spun off by hand. When I put the nut on for the new hand-guard though I quickly found out that the new nut is nowhere near any size that the ar15 wrench would work on. To get it on I tightened it by hand as absolutely tight as I could. This left just a hair over 1/4 of the gas tube hole cover so I stuck a nail into the pin slot of the barrel nut, put a wedge against it and tapped it carefully until the gas block hole was lined up enough to easily slip the tube through.

I work on motorcycles and classic muscle cars so I do have torque wrenches but don't have the correct wrench to use with an LAR-8 nut... and apparently RRA is 60-90 days out for shipping and wants $70 for the tool...

I heard/read from several folks that the correct method to tighten them is to just use the "hand tight then align the next 1/4 hole" method I did and that the torque specs have a very wide range. Others said get it right on torque spec. Can anyone here enlighten me as to who is correct? I am very mechanically inclined and frankly I am use to glance at torque specs then tightening it to "good enough". I don't want to be half a**ing something that I shouldn't though.

To re-align the gas tube I figure I was all good if I just stuck a piece of tube on the gas tube output side and move the block around until I could blow most freely through it. Everything else seemed very straightforward so I am hoping I'm all set.

Thank you guys in advance for the feedback!

 

[yesterdayze]

As an update I called up one of the local gun and sporting shops, probably one of the ones that has been in business here the longest, and asked my question. They confirmed that this was fine and a generally accepted way to do it. The gentleman I spoke with noted that I just need to make sure I don't go to tight and strip the threads and that the gas tube goes through without any deflection.

I'm not giving this as gospel or advice, just what I was told. Feel free to let me know if that is 'crazy talk'