Alright, I'm at my wit's end. Maybe someone here has seen something like this.

I've got a Bushy upper and I've put a 12" YHM free-float forearm on it. The forearm is crooked, however, so with attached iron the gun shoots way off.

I thought at first it was the tube itself. I put a second one on and it lines up identical to the first. That's not the problem.

I emailed YHM, and they say "sometimes the hole in the reciever that the barrel
installs in is not perfectly straight. A fraction of an inch off at the barrel nut is multiplied
over 12" of length. If this is the case, you can either live with it or replace the reciever."

I ran that by my gunsmith, who dismissed it as poppycock. He thinks it's either a bad lot of YHM tubes or the barrel nut not threading onto the receiver properly.

I asked him to test the barrel, which he did by dropping a rod down it, so we know it's not bent, but how does that determine whether or not it's straight on the receiver? And how can I tell if the threads for the barrel nut are straight without throwing cash at a replacement nut?

I'm too heavily invested into this gun to not fix this, but I can't go tossing money at every little thing that *might* be wrong. Can anyone speak to this problem? I'm running out of hair dealing with this.

This is not what I envisioned for my first AR. Having a hard time justifying another one already...

Thanks for all the help.

could it be a possible barrel extension being out of spec? That or the receiver threads.

What do you mean crooked?  If you installed the forearm, are you sure you didn't cross-thread the YHM barrel nut on to the receiver?

Toward the end of the rifle, where the barrel should exit the free-float tube dead-center, it's instead located nearer to one side of the tube than the other. At first glance it looks like the barrel is bent.

I had a gunsmith put the whole thing together. Looking at the threads on the receiver I can't imagine how it could possibly be cross-threaded and fit as flush to the receiver as it does. The threads show no damage either.

I suppose it comes down to one of four things:

1. The barrel slot in the receiver is not straight, as suggested by YHM. I assume that would mean that the barrel itself is crooked after all.
2. The threads that secure the free-float tube to the barrel nut are off. I've tried two different tubes with exactly the same results, so this is possible. I've got a new nut incoming, so this and the next possibility will be ruled in/out shortly.
3. The threads which attach the nut to the receiver are off.
4. The threads on the receiver are off.

So the nut or the receiver.

What's funny is that I've pieced this rifle together over the last month, waiting on this part and that, making little mistakes in ordering and correcting them. This is the fourth or fifth time I've gotten out of bed thinking "this is the day my AR comes together!"

It's been a tough month. One more week. Or two...then I can go live on the ranch a while.

My gunsmith did comment that the original barrel nut was completely oversaturated with LocTite. It did take some work to get off, as he tells it.

Thank you for the tips. I'll try to dig up proper tools to measure these kinds of thing tomorrow. It's off by less than a half inch a 12" so I'm not geared up to work that precisely. Most likely I'll run the ideas by my gunsmith and see what we can dig up.

What Dano said.

Is it possible the face of the receiver is not square where the barrel mounts?

I talked to my gunsmith today, who is a pretty skilled guy. He used heat to get the barrel nut off, and I'm inclined to believe that anything that went into his shop came out in no worse functional shape than it went in. We both missed the angled forearm at first though.

I've actually been thinking about the replacement upper option. If the new barrel nut doesn't solve the problem I'm more inclined to just eat an extra $100 to be done with it than to ship the whole upper back to get checked out. I'm sure the shop I bought it from would look at it, but I'm in no mood to get in the middle of a pissing match between them, Yankee Hills, and my gunsmith about what's wrong and who did it.

You guys have all been awesome, these forums are a treasure trove of great information.