Man, I have. In the last 20 years I’ve seen / heard add on cans get as quiet as MP5SD setups with the correct ammo. That is pretty amazing to me. 20 years ago you could get a .22 that quiet, not 9mm or any other handgun round.
Using standard 5.56 and .308 still gives you a ballistic crack and it will never be “pew pew” quiet, but we have come a long way. The Ti cans are also a lot lighter. Cans that almost tame 5.56 and .308 have gotten smaller and lighter.
I disagree. I’ve seen the freeze plug baffles that work just like a clipped baffle stack.
That’s it. Most of our shooting is 300WM, 6.5CM, 7.62, and 5.56mm. Differences are barely noticeable for the most part. Of course the 300WM is a little thumpier, but like I said… for whatever reason, the 762sdn is the only one that raises an eyebrow for being barkier than the rest.
Most people clip freeze plugs. There are some silencers that use alternate methods like ports in the baffles, but it doesn’t work very well. The name of the game is to install the can, sight it in, and don’t take the can off after that.
Didn’t PB do a F1 can without clips that was noticeably louder than normal?
I think the best way to visualize it is to think of the gas coming out of the barrel like water comes out of a hose. That concentrated, high pressure column is what hits the atmosphere and makes the waves that you hear as sound. By breaking up that column, you lower the pressure and velocity of the gas before it hits the atmosphere, and therefore lower the resulting pressure wave.
Problem is, you can’t put anything in that column’s path to break it up, because that’s where the bullet comes out, too. So you have to create a pressure differential in the can to encourage the gas to flow in one direction, causing the column to bend slightly, driving it down into the baffles.
People have tried alternate methods of interrupting the column, namely by using ports in the baffles to try and create jets of gas that aimed at the column are intended to disperse it. The problem with that is that the gas routed through those ports is already at a much lower pressure, so it’s like trying to break up the laminar flow out of a fire hose with a squirt gun.
Yep. I did the work. That kit had baffles that just looked inefficient… less conical in shape than I’d like. The company had nice baffles on their site after we bought and finished the kit. But I built it with, I think, 5 of the baffles un-modded; just bored out. And it was louder than a can should be.
I pulled it apart and added a 6th freeze plug baffle and some sloppy clips to the existing baffles. The can sounded like the rest of the batch after that.
Yes, it seems the asymmetric clips help “steer” that column off axis in a similar manner to which a lens bends light.
Stack a few in a row and you can get some good deflection.
Seven baffles seems to be a good default number, but various designs have more or less.
Clip example Rugged Obsidian 45 for reference:
My working theory is it’s not so much about how many baffles there are but more about how long the can is. You see a lot of factory cans with 3 baffles, and the first is generally more along the lines of a blast diffuser. Then you see other factory cans that have like 20 baffles. The common theme though is the long ones are quiet and the short ones are loud.
It’s weird. We shoot the sig cans that have like a dozen baffles, and then I have an M4-1000 that has 4 baffles… from the shooter position, they’re not THAT different.
Pappabear also has the Mini KAC 556 can… and that one is a little barky. But for the size of it, you can’t complain.
Yes, there is considerable variation in the number of baffles.
The TurboK is amazing for what it is and only has 3.
I like the smaller cans on Gas guns. It’s a little louder off the gun, but the lower back pressure seems to make the port snap a little less noisy so it actually seems quieter to me in the shooter position on the few I’ve shot.
Isn’t that an Ops Inc can? If so, revolutionary for the time and still pretty robust but probably a dated design at this point.
Last I saw the Surefire cutaways, they were effectively an fancy freeze plug type stack. I could be senile, but I don’t remember their cans being heavy on the clipped feature at all.