swapping barrels on a savage rival is actually pretty easy you do need a
couple of specialized tools though first off you're going to need a barrel vise
and the appropriate bushings for your barrel you're going to need a barrel nut
wrench and these are pretty cheap and you'll need headspace gauges to make
sure that headspace is correct when you actually get this all put together and
aside from that you'll need just some basic tools you'll probably have lying
around your garage you'll need a wrench to tighten the the barrel vise down and
if you have a torque wrench it's going to be a nice way to attach the barrel
nut but you can also use a mallet and I'll show you that method here in a
minute so what we're going to be doing is we're
going to be removing this 308 barrel from this savage axis and we're going to
be replacing it with this 7 millimeter oh 8 that came off a Steven's 200 this
is the outgoing budget rival from Savage for those of you that aren't familiar
with the the bill that we're doing here you should probably subscribe to the
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and then this playlist down here we'll have everything in it because what we're
doing is we are taking a savage axis and we're turning this into a thousand-yard
competition rival we've already done a trick her job on this thing and now it's
time to get the superior ballistics of seven millimeter oh wait our first step
is to select the correct diameter and profile of our barrel bushings so I've
selected some here okay this one we're definitely not going to use this looks
like it's for a bull barrel this is very fat and it's straight okay so this one
right here you can see has some taper to it so this is more like a sport or
weight barrel profile like we have here but I've gone ahead and I've actually
selected the correct one that's going to fit our barrel the best we want a
bushing that's going to fit pretty well back toward the action we want to have
all of our torque centered right here around the the area of work here we
don't want to be grabbing out on the end of the barrel so
this one it has a little bit of a taper to it as it should and it locks neatly
into place right about there on the barrel if
you're concerned about the fit of your bushing maybe it doesn't fit exactly you
can just wrap a piece of paper around your barrel put it between the barrel
and the bushing and that should protect the finish on your barrel here I have
the barrel placed inside the bushing make sure that you put the wrench on
first I don't know how many times I've done this where I get the barrel all
tightened down and realize I didn't actually put the wrench on so just let
that hang and now it's time to tighten down the barrel vise don't have a big
breaker bar no problem just make sure you're going the correct direction when
you start we are turning the nut on to the barrel that way so it's going to be
clockwise okay so that's loose and theoretically this action should be
loose enough to come off now I think they put some kind of material maybe
some epoxy or something on the threads here so it's always a little tricky to
take this off the first time so we'll just have to oh no nevermind there goes
that just turns right off all right this is really weird when we turned the
action off we're seeing tons and tons of these little metal shavings these little
metal balls and we can tell they're metal because they are actually sticking
to this magnet here and they are all over the threads of the the the barrel
there here inside the action I have no idea what this is but I'm guessing it's
not really supposed to be there it doesn't look like anything's damaged
though so I think we'll just clean this up and then go ahead and attach that
barrel
unless there's some revolutionary new technique of jamming your threads of
metal filings I'm guessing that this was a huge mistake it took a while to clean
this out we had to clean the action the nut and the barrel and finally
everything's nice and smooth this thing's turning on nicely time to loosen
up device and get this barrel out now that we have our cleaned up action it's
time to put the seven millimeter Oh 8 barrel on and first we need to put this
and the wrench here on the now vacated barrel vise before you starts crew wing
the action in place make sure that you have your barrel nut pretty far forward
on the threads and you have your wrench hanging off the barrel I don't know how
many times I've done this where I forget to put the wrench on there and then I
have to do all my work over again so all you have to do is just start threading
the action back on and once you've gone a few threads in open up your bolt and
this is where we start putting in the headspace gauge this is a go gauge and
it's pretty much just a cartridge is what it's in this is like a case it has
a rim just like a case and it has a shoulder and this is meant to be a
headspace gauge for everything in a 308 family of cartridges this will work on
308 seven millimeter oh eight like this barrel 260 Remington 243 Winchester and
when you put this in you just want to make sure that this rim actually does
snap over the extractor on your bolt so instead of just popping this directly
into the chamber I'm going to actually attach this to the bolt and run the bolt
in
close the bolt and then continue threading your action on to the barrel
and at some point this is going to come to a stop okay so that's it right there
you don't want to just crank this on to the barrel that's going to create a
little bit too tight a space what you want is just fingertip tight now once
you have that take your barrel nut thread it the other direction and snug
it up against the action and this time since I actually have the wrench in
place I'm just going to slowly turn that nut on okay you can see that this action
just turned on me while I was turning the nut and that has changed our
dimension so it looks like this one is just a little bit too loose of fit
sometimes you can get away with just tightening the nut onto the action but
apparently this is not one of those times so what I'm going to do is just
back this off a few threads and put a little bit of Loctite on the threads let
that solidify let it dry for a little while and then we'll come back and try
putting the nut on again the lock tight should have dried by now in here so now
it's time to turn this wrench and turn the barrel nut on to the action and in
the meantime I did take the go gauge out so let's make sure to put that back in
I'm going to put this back under the extractor okay so that's under the
extractor feed that into the chamber all right and this still closes down now
it's time to turn the wrench turn this nut on and just for safety's sake I'm
going to go ahead and apply a little torque this way to make sure this
doesn't break the nut or break the action loose and spin the action off as
well okay that's looking pretty good and now one thing that I can do at this
point I can use a torque wrench and although I haven't seen any actual
technical specs from savage about how much torque to put on this I've read
around the you know 35 pound-feet of torque is what you're after now most of
you guys probably won't have a torque wrench so there's a pretty quick way to
do this just take a mallet and give this thing a wrap tada
done give it a second one and really that should be on there good and tight
all right next we need to make sure that the headspace is correct everything
should be good but just to make sure that nothing walked out I'm going to
remove the go gage and I'm gonna drop this back into its protective sleeve and
now we're going to do the no go gage
this one is a just a little bit longer I think it's three thousandths longer and
the bolt should not close on this gage if it does start over do it again okay
so I finally got that under the extractor goes into the chamber
and this should not close nope that is going nowhere perfect
so the headspace is correct put the no-go gauge back into this
sleeve and that's it this thing is complete and we can just
pull this out of the vise
you