T.K. Nollan’s Barrel Saver Cleaning Rod Guide
Smart shooters know the importance of using a quality cleaning rod bore guide when cleaning barrels. The rod guide helps center the rod in the bore, preventing uneven wear on the rifling. Good bore guides also seal off the chamber to prevent solvents and gunk from flowing back into the bolt raceway and trigger housing. While most bore guides are “better than nothing”, the best designs are custom-sized to the chamber and also have a very tight clearance around the rod shaft. This prevents the rod from bowing and from dragging on the critical throat area of your rifle. We use Lucas Rod Guides for many of our rifles. The Lucas two-part design, with a caliber-specific insert, provides a tight fit for the rod.
T.K. Nollan’s Barrel Saver System
While many readers may have seen or used Lucas Rod Guides, T.K. Nollan makes another very high-quality cleaning rod guide that is favored by top benchrest shooters such as Tony Boyer, Dwight Scott, and Dick Wright. If, like many short-range Benchresters, you do a lot of barrel brushing, it may be worth investing in the $135.00 Barrel Saver.
T.K. Nollan’s patent-pending Barrel Saver is a precision-machined system designed to provide maximum protection during barrel cleaning. The Barrel Saver features a double O-ring “fail-safe” seal, and a stainless steel outer tube with straightness held to within .001″. To help ensure optimal alignment, a bushing, custom-sized for your action, precisely centers the outer tube in your action. Models are offered for Hall, Stolle, Grizzly, Farley, Remington, RFD, Nesika Bay, Borden, BAT, Viper and similar 2-lug actions.
Each Nollan Barrel Saver comes with two (2) metal guide tubes, one for brushes and the other for jags. As you can see in the slide show below, these brush/jag tubes run INSIDE the larger diameter guide which slides into the action and chamber. This “tube-within-tube” design, combined with the 0-ring for the chamber, ensures that the cleaning rod stays precisely centered, even if you brush fairly aggressively. While we strongly advocate bore-brushing only in the outward direction, we know some shooters prefer to brush back and forth. If you are a “back and forth” cleaner, you NEED a product like the T.K. Nollan Barrel Saver.
T.K. Nollan Barrel Savers start at $135.00 plus $9.00 shipping for PPC-type chamberings. Custom sizes cost $150.00 plus $9.00 shipping. Each Barrel Saver kit comes complete with two Rod Guide Tubes and spare O-rings. For more info, visit the Barrel Saver website, or contact T.K. Nollan at this address:
TK Tool Co. – Precision Benchrest Tools
tknemail [at] gmail.com
401 South Cimarron St.
Catoosa, OK 74015
(918) 633-2966 (Call before 9:00 PM CST)
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Tags: Barrel, bore, Bore Guide, Bronze, Brush, Cleaning, Jag, Patch, Rifle Barrel
It’s hard to tell from the pictures, but this might be a case of excellent machining and shaky engineering. It this device depends on the front O-ring to center itself in the chamber, it’s probably a waste of money compared to the many other, similar but much less costly competitors. O-rings are not designed to maintain concentricity, they squish circumferentially just as well as they do radially, and there is no reason to expect that they will center. In fact, if the guide has to be rotated to engage (like a bolt), one might expect some eccentricity.
I don’t want to knock this product, but the article lacks any real data to justify the cost, and the design appears to have little to recommend it over less costly guides.
The O ring is to form a seal so that solvent does not pass that point. If you will take another look at the picture, the part that is labeled as the adjustable retaining lug (which centers the guide in the action’s rear bridge) has a thumbscrew near its back edge. After the lug is rotated into a position where it prevents the guide from being withdrawn to the rear of the action, the thumbscrew is may be slightly loosened so that the main tube of the guide can be slid forward untill the angled face of the tube makes contact with the shoulder of the chamber. Once this has been done, the thumbscrew is tightened. and the contact between the front of the tube and the shoulder of the chamber keeps the guide well centered in a very positive manner. This is the pinnacle of current cleaning rod guide technology, which is not to say that careful use of other designs will not achieve good results. It can, but this is the most foolproof, and given the really bad rod technique that I have seen employed by some otherwise quite talented shooters, I think that there is a real need…unless your perspective is that of a gunsmith or barrel maker looking to increase sales.
Thank you, Mr. Allen, for the explanation.