How does a firearm silencer work

If you pop a balloon with a pin, it will make a loud noise. But if you were to untie the end of the balloon and let the air out slowly, you could pop it making very little noise. That is the basic idea behind a gun silencer.

The gunpowder creates a high-pressure pulse of hot gas. The pressure of the gas forces the bullet down the barrel of the gun. When the bullet exits the end of the barrel, it is like uncorking a bottle. A silencer screws on to the end of the barrel and has a huge volume compared to the barrel 20 or 30 times greater.

Both of these types are installed in similar ways. Quick attach suppressors require an additional accessory, such as a muzzle brake or flash hider, in order to mount onto the weapon. To use this type of suppressor, you need to thread your brake or hider onto the barrel of your gun, after which you can mount the quick attach onto the muzzle device. The only difference between locking and non-locking quick-attaches is the fact that non-locking means, as the name would suggest, they do not have any locking mechanism.

Back in , an American inventor by the name of Hiram Percy Maxim created the first working suppressor, which was available for commercial sale. Firearm innovation ran through his blood with his father, Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim, having invented the first portable version of a fully automatic machine gun.

That company is still around today as a leading manufacturer of control silencers for exhaust, emissions, and more. The tax remains in effect to this day. As innovations in technology increased, so did the market for improved gun suppressors. When firing a gun, the gunpowder in the bullet casing ignites, creating an immense amount of pressure.

This pressure propels the bullet down the barrel of the gun, pushing the round at incredible speeds. When the bullet exits the barrel, the pressure is released and an extremely loud noise is produced. What a suppressor does is provide a larger space for the pressure and hot gases to expand after exiting the barrel. The gases expand as they are heated when the gun fires, but the suppressor traps and slowly releases this gas, resulting in a much quieter shot.

However, the volume of gas a gunshot produces is usually very large if it is to produce the required power. The peak pressure in a rifle chamber may reach a couple of thousand atmospheres; that in a handgun perhaps half this figure because, although their bullet velocity is only of the order of one-third to half that of a medium-calibre rifle, they typically only have a fifth to a quarter of the barrel length to accelerate in.

Therefore, to vent to atmosphere at or near comparable pressure, a silencer would need to have a volume of one or two thousand times that of the weapon's chamber.

This would normally evaluate to several litres; and the usual type of silencer seen in thrillers is therefore obviously far too small.

So the short answer to the question: "How do gun silencers work? They usually affect accuracy severely and, especially in the case of small self-loaders, make the gun impossible to aim by obstructing the sight picture. For standard handguns of mm. Silencing a supersonic round such as 9mm. Nevertheless, silencers of this size and type are very effective on smallbore rimfire rabbit rifles, and have also been used successfully on. They are usually known more accurately as "moderators" in these applications To silence larger weapons properly often requires that the silencer is embodied in the construction of the weapon.

One successful example was the De Lisle carbine, first built as a clandestine weapon during WW2. This was a Lee-Enfield rifle rebarrelled from the powerful. When fired out of a suppressed firearm, the gas is slowed by the baffles and leaves cooler and dispersed — creating a less-loud phut sound. As for the pew that comes out of every gun in Hollywood spy movies, that is entirely a work of fiction.

In a May episode of MythBusters , Jaime and Adam experimented with the effects of a suppressor on an un-suppressed. They had a sound engineer record the decibels and fired three shots from each gun. They repeated the experiment using firearm suppressors and compared the results to what we see in most films.