Could someone explain why clipping cones helps? I've checked the forum but can't find a discussion on that.

I'm not asking about symmetrical vs single clips, I'm asking how it is that clipping itself seems to help.

Looking forward to your ideas.

I believe it's going to be because it causes more turbulence inside the can. Anything that will move the moving gasses away from the bore line and cause them to swirl/build up in a chamber will slow them, allowing them to cool and reduce the sound.

That's a very good theory.

I believe it's because when you put clips in your baffles it creates a space for gnomes of quiet to nest. If you dirty their nests with too much unclean powder or lead deposits they'll leave and the can gets loud again.

It's nice to hear all this Science here.

Lots of sciencing.

Well it seems fair enough that you're getting fairly casual responses... I mean, considering that you say you 'checked' but couldn't find anything about clips on baffles. It's almost as though you didn't actually read any discussions regarding baffles. I mean, considering that most discussions about baffles include at least some consideration of clipping and/or porting, and quite a few of the discussions around here include rather detailed looks at how clipping and/or porting function to modify the high pressure gas flow as it moves through a suppressor. Are you asking for a dissertation? How about spending a few dozen hours actually reading through archived posts before concluding that this has not been covered. To death.

Now to be fair, no one has actually climbed inside a suppressor and experienced first hand exactly what is happening at a clipped baffle edge, as well as a plain cone, and then come back to tell us all about how they're different. It's understandable that there is this gap, considering the very dark, confined conditions, and the extreme fluctuations in temperature and pressure. That would not be a fun job. And instrumentation has been applied to an extent, pressure sensors and the like, but they don't really tell the whole story, any more than fluid dynamics simulations in many posts have told the story. But people try.

My best guess lines up with the above; high pressure expanding gases want to get out of the tube, so they generally take the path of least resistance. Of course this is not good if what we want from that tube is a reduction in noise, so we modify the entry points and other elements of our baffles so as to stand a better chance of disturbing that flow as much as is possible before it gets out the far end. By doing so, with clipping and sometimes porting (K baffles have each), we achieve often impressive noise reduction in a relatively small volume of tubing. The particular manner in which these features work is often a combination of trial and error with a heap of intuition, gained from experience and from looking over the shoulders of those who came before. Look at the completed silencers thread, click a lot of those links, and learn.

kohalajohn wrote:It's nice to hear all this Science here.

Lots of sciencing.

Yep, observations indicate it's not all science, there's a fair amount of creativity and art that goes into making the top performers. A lot of trial and error but no clean cut formula.

The Dater Hole is another example.

Allowing a path for the gasses to escape that is not concentric allow the gas to escape quicker in certain spots which causes the rest of the trapped gasses to swirl around the bore rather than just longitudinally causing a longer path.

My $.02

My simple theory:
The projectile forms a temporary "plug" in the baffle orifice and causes the gas pressure to swirl around that baffle's cone. At that same instant, the gas pressure passes through the area created by the clip. That "jet" of gas pressure flows onto the slope of the next cone, swirling around in the space between the baffles and slows its flow as it cools. This is repeated for each of the baffles in the tube.

doubloon wrote:That's a very good theory.

I believe it's because when you put clips in your baffles it creates a space for gnomes of quiet to nest. If you dirty their nests with too much unclean powder or lead deposits they'll leave and the can gets loud again.

I like your theory better than mine.

doubloon wrote: they'll leave and the can gets loud again.

Do they leave or hide in a crevice and sulk?

This is so much fun.