@flyer1a can you comment more on the thought process behind the internal design and material selection?
Why a non-welded, non-user serviceable design? What are the baffle material(s)? Can the user pour in some CLR to clean it at the end of the season?
What kind of CFD and real-life testing did you do to optimize the baffle design?
A curious engineer would like to know ?
So all of the baffles, except for the blast baffle, will be Grade-5 Ti. It's the standard in light/durable baffles for a reason. The blast baffle is 17-4 Stainless, as we wanted the extra durability. The brake itself is all 17-4. This is a material we have more experience with, and it also works out nicely to balance weight in the brake and the Stage 2.
We aren't welding because with Jon's taper/skirt design we don't have to, and it remains serviceable for us. This helps in two scenarios:
1) There's a baffle strike
2) We find a way to improve the internals and want to offer re-cores (more on that later)
We didn't want customers to be able to take them apart because of what we think will be an inability to assemble them correctly. The can is designed with the baffles that compress into one another via taper, and we have a specific torque we want on each end cap. Unless you have a collet system to hold the suppressor, you would not be able to replicate this torque (and not damage the can by crushing it in a vise).
We did very little CFD, as we started to play with models, realized they were likely junk as CFD doesn't include a vital part of the equation - the bullet - so we confirmed this with some other people in the suppressor business and they confirmed the issue with CFD. The only way to do this modeling is incredibly arduous and costly. It's something we are going to push into, but are still skeptical of the relevance.
Real-world testing was a fairly long process. We have a bucket of different baffle designs, lengths, angles, clips, mouths, etc, that became a testing project. We bought a capable sound meter, and surrounded the rifle with open ears, and kept good notes, and it led us to a design we were happy with. Something about suppressors that's hard to deal with is the idea of tone. While dB ratings are what everyone wants, talk to anyone with a lot of suppressor experience and they'll tell you that 1-2 dB can be far less important than the ear/tone test. Hard to quantify, but we paid as much attention to it as we could. That said, the shop-serviceable design would allow us to re-core in the future if we found something that was better in a worthwhile way.
For cleaning/service we intend on customer being able to send them in annually for a cleaning. We will have simple downloadable cards to be filled out (we want to know how many rounds you think are on it, what calibers you shoot, stuff like that. Helps us track can behavior) and shipped in with the suppressor in its supplied hard case. We will disassemble the can, clean it, check for damage/wear, and return you a unit that is ready for more work.
What did I miss?
The goal is to be wholly transparent on this process, as we think customers deserve it.
