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!
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!