Hard nose bar ?

In going from a sprocket nose bar to a hard nose bar, with everything else remaining the same, how much would it affect the rpm's? I assume you would not set rpm's to the max with the hard nose bar? Thanks for your help.

With the shorter lengths, the only real different will be tension, you won't need to snug it up quite so much. A teeny bit of droop is ok.
The amount of extra friction is very small until bar length goes beyond 20" or so.

Why did you go hard-nose? Typically an old-school thing to do for working in some really nasty, dirty wood.

No moving parts is a plus, initial cost is lower, durability is unmatched, in normal use there is little difference and they do stand up well in less than ideal conditions.

The two 031AV I traded for the other day were from a roofing company. They had 16" solid nose bars with tar all over one of the bars, although the other one is clean. I imagine they were used to cut through roofs, asphalt, nails, shingle stones, etc. Supprisingly. the saws are in very nice shape, I was expecting there to be a lot of tar stuff under the sprocket cover, but there wasn't. I was sort of disappointed that they weren't sprocket nose bars, but after reading the above, I guess they are just fine. Also came with 4 like new safety chains.

Is this bar on your 5100? What length?

(I'm not criticizing--just curious.)

MasterMech i wanted a backup bar to my Domar and thought this might hold up well. I cut most of my firewood on US Forest land and the trees have to be down and dead so end up fooling with dirty wood at times. Basically what RK_MacKendrick said is what i was hoping for

TreePointer, i may very well need your criticizing. It is 20" and i put it on the 5100 yesterday with a new Oregon 375 X 50 round chisel skip--72JGX. I emailed Oregon about using the bar on my saw and the tech said it would be fine. I did notice how the chain doesn't move as well as the full chisel on my 20" Dolmar bar when pulling it by hand, but i guess it will do better once i use it