I thought I would provide my results and some lessons learned. It looks like it is going to shoot great. It is a stainless 7 twist .223 from Patriot Valley Arms, 24" and threaded heavy varmint. The best group I got was with some 62grn federal/american eagle, with one of the ar10 guys with a loud brake shooting a round a second and a 20 round mag at a time, and with the wind howling. I was really just breaking it in before shooting a ladder. Lots of touching bullet holes and some jittery flyers.
Lessons learned
1. Use a receiver wrench that holds on the inside of the lugs from the rear. As you can see I scuffed up my receiver with an action wrench that holds on the outside of the receiver. That finish wear was from putting the receiver into the wrench. The tool mfg said: factory Remington actions are too inconsistent to hold without marring the surface. I'm just glad I didn't start with something nice.
2. Use a savage style barrel nut. I wanted to use a 6 point nut for appearances: as a Remington guy I just think the Savage nut is kinda ugly. While you can use a large crow foot open end or make your own tool, it is hard to simply achieve a precise 60ftlb torque and not mar the finish on your barrel nut. If you use a Savage nut there a large number of short wrenches with a 1/2" drive hole to simplify torqueing. I've been through the same exercise with some AR10 barrel nuts that use flats and proprietary wrench sizes (not metric or standard).
