We have a tendency to fixate on the baffles themselves, cause thats where all the technology is housed. Most people just assume you want to stuff as many baffles into a tube as possible for maximum performance. I know thats how I thought up until recently. My early designs had very tight spacing and suffered from bad first round pop amongst other things.
It turns out the baffle is only half the battle. The other half being how the baffles are spaced out in the tube.
Today we tried less baffles and wider spacing and the results were ..... impressive.
The test gun is a Ruger MK2 with a 5" bull barrel. The test can was 6.75" OAL and had only 4 baffles in it.
The result was that the action cycling was the dominant noise to the point where it was actually difficult to separate the muzzle signature from the "clackety clack" of the bolt. In order to compare it to a suppressed rifle of known sound reduction, we had to hold the action shut with our thumb. The pistol's muzzle signature is just a bit louder than the rifle, which had been previously metered at 110 dB.
As we didn't make a tube specially for this test, we were only using an existing tube so it wasn't optimised for spacing. I am certain we can cut 0.5" to 0.75" off the OAL without compromising sound reduction.
We also tried a 5.5" long tube with only 3 baffles in it. This combination was also impressively quiet with the action noise being easily distinguishable. However, the extra baffle in the longer unit puts it into the "spooky" noise bracket meaning it is the one we are going to pursue.
