Suppressors are a great device to have in addition to hearing protection. Here’s a little on how they work
The basic designs of suppressors fall into two camps, and each is either sealed or user-serviceable. User-serviceable is the technical term for “take it apart and clean it.” The two camps are baffle stack and monocore.
What are the ins and outs of suppressors?
- Suppressors come in many shapes and sizes, but there are two basic designs.
- These include baffle stack and monocore.
- There are five levels of sealed suppressors.
- Cap-welded, Tack-welded, Fully Welded Stack, Fully Welded with no tube, monocore.
- Generally speaking, the more welding involved in manufacture, the more it costs.
Simply put, a suppressor is a tube with a series of partitions inside that trap the expanding gases and slow their release into the air. This reduces the pressure wave, and thus the noise, the firearm creates.
The full technical explanation involves physics, metallurgy, heat transfer, the chaotic movement of gases under pressure, and we’ll skip that.
Suppressor Design And Construction
Making a suppressor is both easy and difficult. It is easy, in that pretty much anything you put over the end of the muzzle will dampen noise. (Which can, in some instances and designs, be against the law without proper paperwork.) It is difficult in that what you use to dampen noise can degrade accuracy, cause difficulties aiming, and can be inconvenient, messy and just plain ugly.
Suppressor designers and manufacturers work hard to make suppressors easy, convenient, good-looking, not harmful to (actually increasing) accuracy, and all this while significantly reducing noise.
The basic designs of suppressors fall into two camps, and each is either sealed or user-serviceable. User-serviceable is the technical term for “take it apart and clean it.” The two camps are baffle stack and monocore.
Baffle Stack
The baffle stack design entails a tube, and inside the tube the manufacturer places a stack of relatively cone-shaped baffles. Back in the early days, there were two versions, the “K” baffle and the “M” baffle. Today, we have more than two, they all work, and the details matter only to those who obsess over fractions of a dB in on-the-range testing. The baffles are machined to have space between them. The spaces they create are the volume into which the gases will expand. The first of these is called the “expansion chamber.”
The baffles can have various shapes, as seen in cross-section, and they can also have holes drilled through them to create turbulence in the gas flow. Turbulence increases efficiency and makes a suppressor quieter, although some argue just how much it matters.
The baffles must be kept in place, so they are machined for a snug or tight fit in the tube. The tube is sealed with front and rear caps, trapping the baffle stack inside. The rear cap also contains the mount design, either direct-thread or QD.
On a rimfire or pistol-caliber suppressor, the front and rear caps are threaded so you can take the suppressor apart and clean it. If you do not, it will collect powder residue, lube and bullet material, which hardens into an impressive layer. This can build up until the suppressor is only a heavy tube with minimal clearance for the bullet, and no effective baffles left, the baffles now buried under the gunk.
Rifle-caliber suppressors are self-cleaning, and as a result they are not often user-serviceable. They do not need to be, unless the centerfire rifle you shoot uses cast lead bullets. Then, you’d better have a cleanable suppressor on…