5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Buying My First Suppressor

Overview:

Buying your first suppressor can be a big investment in time & money. Rob Orgel provides the 5 things he wish he knew before buying his first suppressor to help you with your purchase decision. These factors include point of impact shift, weight & length, sound suppression, modularity & mounting systems and finally, back pressure.

Skip To Video Topic:

00:00 - Intro
00:30 - #5 POI Shift
01:25 - #4 Weight & Length
02:30 - #3 Longer Is Quieter
03:08 - #2 Modularity & Mounting Systems
04:36 - #1 Back Pressure

Transcript:

Hey everybody, Rob Orgel. In today's video, I wanted to show you a handful of things that I wish I had known before I purchased my first suppressor. Now of course you see a whole bunch of suppressors in front of you, which means hard lessons learned. Nobody likes to give the government $200 and wait one, six, eight, 10 months to find out that the suppressor that you got is not all it was cracked up to be. So we're going to start with five and count our way down to one being the most important thing I wish I had known. Kicking it off. Number five, point of impact shift. Now of course this video is specific to rifles. In pistols we might not notice it, but in rifles we get what's called barrel harmonics or barrel whip. Every time you fire, your gun goes through a little bit of a whip. When you add weight to the end of that, that might give you an impact to the south. Now you might ring a piece of steel at one, two, three hundred yards, put your suppressor on, ring the same piece of steel and say, "No POI shift." But the reality is we need to put our rifle to paper. Some rifles have no shift, some rifles have a shift of around, I would say up to 2.5 inches. Now I've done a lot of testing with a lot of people's equipment, not just my own, and I have found this to be very consistent. If it is something other than 2.5 inches or it's more than 2.5 inches, it's time to investigate what's going on with that suppressor. Now once you've identified your shift, you can record that, read zero, do what you need to do, and then you shouldn't notice that shift going forward. Number four, added weight and length. So when we pick up a suppressor and say, "It's not that heavy," by comparison to the suppressor, that's in your hands. What we're not doing is putting it on the end of a rifle, and that might give us an increased felt weight. It's one thing to hold five pounds, it's one thing to hold five pounds out in front of you. So if we have a whole bunch of length and a whole bunch of weight, it can come to be very taxing very quick. And this comes back to my ideal suppressor, which doesn't exist, and it's super light, super tiny and super quiet with no added back pressure. It just doesn't exist. So finding that proper balance so that when you're hiking around with your hunting rifle, and it doesn't become crazy taxing because you've got a 20-something ounce suppressor hanging off the end of it. The length part is referring to on precision rifles that go in my scabbard style backpack. If I don't have a folding chassis or stock, it is so long that often I'm snapping tree branches above my head as I'm hiking through the woods. So finding some way to mitigate that weight and length like a folding stock will really make your weapon much more capable of going in the vehicle and in the backpack like it used to. Number three, going back to that perfect world of a tiny, super quiet, no back pressure, super light suppressor, it doesn't exist. So I have found, I made the mistake and I found a lot of other people make the mistake that they buy the smallest suppressor they can get because they want quiet, but most of all they want small, no added length. While I can appreciate that, I have switched sides and I much prefer a larger and more quiet suppressor. Now of course if I can get a titanium and maintain that super light and just add length, that's nice as long as I can mitigate that length because in the end I really want maximum sound reduction as most of us tend to search for in the US private market. Number two is modularity and mounting systems. So on several of the suppressors you see in front of you, they are proprietary, meaning I have to use so and so's muzzle device or so and so's muzzle device and they don't interchange. It's quite annoying. My collection is kind of designated with some 14 fives and when you pin and weld a 14 five, changing that out becomes quite difficult, expensive and then you have to wait for it to go out and come back again. It also means you're going to have a real hard time changing your gas system afterwards. So if you can have a modular system, this allows you to remove the hub and replace the hub with your preferred mounted solution. Now it's not just the mount and muzzle device, it's also the front. You might have a three baffle extension, you might have an interchangeable end cap. All of those modularity things are nice but keep in mind if you screw it together and shoot a couple of mags, it often will come loose and if it comes loose and you strike a baffle or the end cap, you could damage your suppressor, you could send your suppressor down range or worse have a can blow up on you. So I'm a fan of picking out what you want your suppressor to do and then putting a whole bunch of Loctite on it and make it semi-permanent. I say semi-permanent because I can always undo it with the torch and a little bit of time on the workbench but this way it doesn't happen accidentally on the range. So know that in my opinion, modularity just means you can set it up how you want but you should definitely make it relatively or at least semi-permanent in that setup. Number one, the most important thing you should know about suppressors before you make your purchase is back pressure. Now a lot of people say who cares about back pressure? I care a bunch. I want that suppressor to reduce recoil. I want the weight on the end of the gun to reduce recoil. I want the baffle systems to coil gases and reduce recoil. But if you've got a semi-auto and it's gas operated, you're pushing a whole bunch more gas through that system and increasing your bolt speed. So it's going to feel like it has more recoil. So you're going to undermine the benefits of your suppressor in some ways and you're going to get a bunch of gas and bad toxins that you're going to be breathing in and getting in your eyes. So not just for the felt recoil but the gases to the face that were inhaling and the gases to the eyes that make me tear up and make it difficult for me to continue engaging my target under a high rate of fire. So lower back pressure is our friend. There's another video we created about rating each suppressor, rifle suppressor specifically, in back pressure. Of course, if you're on a bolt action rifle, that's not something you have to worry about. Hopefully we gained a lot from my five top points. I wish I had known before buying a suppressor. Hopefully this saves you some money and some time so that you can select the right suppressor for you. If you like this video, you found it educational, please like, comment, subscribe and help us defeat that algorithm that doesn't like us talking about these cool doohickeys. And as always, stay safe.