The line up

Want to get more feedback from this community, as I'm moving forward with other cans in addition to the Phoenix XLV.

I have 5 that are blueprinted, prototyped, tested and ready to go. The 6th, the Phoenix IX, is a 9mm variant of the Phoenix XLV. I prototyped a 1.375 x 7" version, and it worked well, but I want to see if a 1.25" x 7" or 7.5" version is feasible before I launch it. After all, slimmer is better, and a 1.25" OD would make the factory sights on most pistols totally usable. 1.375" isn't bad with factory sights, but if I can make it slimmer...

Anyway, this is where we're at



From left to right:

1: The Valkyrie 30. This is a titanium housed 1.5" x 8.0" suppressor with a heat treated 17-4 stainless steel fully welded baffle stack, consisting of 10 baffles preceeded by a large blast chamber. Weight is 15.5 ounces, and the taper lock brake for that version weighs 3 ounces. The taper lock brake uses a 20° included angle and 1"-12 TPI threads, so the suppressor is seated in just 6 revolutions, and locks up tight & consistent. I will offer a direct thread option, which will be a bit less expensive. I don't have dB levels for you guys yet, but my ears were fine outdoors on both 13" .308 and 10.5" .223. There is a .223 caliber version, the Valkyrie 224, that is 1.5" x 7.5" with 9 baffles, and about an ounce lighter. Same option for taper lock brake or direct thread. These are the heavy duty critters, full auto rated, and up to and including .300 RUM on the .30 cal. Minimum barrel lengths are 7.5" for .223, 13" for .308, 16" for .30-06 and 18" for magnums, 20" for RUM or others burning 85-100 grains of powder

One taper lock brake is included, MSRP $949. Direct thread MSRP $829. Additional brakes will be $120 each.

Again, don't have a $4k dB meter yet, but the taper lock brake version seems quieter. Notice the brakes in the background; they have a helixed port design to create a vortex in the blast chamber.

2: The Furtivus 30. Also titanium housed, it's 1.5" x 9.0" with the same style fusion TIG welded 17-4 stainless baffle stack, but 11 of them. It weighs 15 ounces, and has the same taper lock brake or direct thread option. Furtivus 224 is 1.5" x 8.0" with 10 baffles, weighs 14 ounces. These are rapid fire rated and magnum rated. I have tested on machine guns, and they held up, but the thinner housings and baffle cones versus the Valkyrie series leave me hesitant to call them full auto rated, lest somebody cook one on a machine gun. They're a little lighter and a little quieter, but not as tough. No free lunch in this game! Minimum barrel lengths are 10" for .223, 15" for .308, 16" for .30-06, 18" for magnums, 22" for RUM or others burning 85-100 grains of powder.

One taper lock brake is included, MSRP $949. Direct thread MSRP $829. Additional brakes will be $120 each.

3: The Furtivus 224, mentioned above.

4: Phoenix XLV, the .45 caliber titanium housed critter with 17-4 stainless and 7075-T651 guts I posted about a couple weeks back. At 10.5 ounces with piston, these are basically in the weight and suppression class of the SilencerCo Osprey, but an inch shorter and a little tougher. User serviceable stacked cone baffles, one 17-4 blast baffle and seven 7075-T651 baffles. Rated for all service type pistol cartridges, including 10mm and .357 magnum, plus subsonic .300 Blk. Direct thread mounts will be available for fixed barrel use.

They will come with one piston or direct thread mount, MSRP $639. Additional pistons will be $80, direct thread mounts will be $60.

5: That is the prototype Phoenix IX, a hybrid cone & K-baffle serviceable 9mm suppressor. The one in the photo is dimensionally identical to the XLV, except 9.8 ounces with the aluminum end cap. If I'm able to make the 1.25" diameter version work, it should still be under 10 ounces with a stainless end cap. I expect to price it the same as the XLV at $639

6: The Ocelot. This is a serviceable stacked baffle rimfire can with a titanium housing, stainless blast baffle and nine stubby 7075 cone baffles, weighing in at 4.0 ounces and measuring 5.5 inches. The end cap is also aluminum, stainless for the threaded base, which are 1/2-28. Rated for all rimfire cartridges, pistol or rifle

MSRP $319.

7: The featherweight. The Lynx is a 5.2" long, 2.9 ounce 7075 aluminum monocore suppressor with a .023" titanium sleeve. It has a steel insert for 1/2-28 direct thread mounting. Though I would say .22 WMR and .17 HMR are OK on rifles with >18" barrels, I'm going to go ahead and call this a .22 LR only suppressor. I'm not aware of any that are lighter

MSRP $349

All of these will have the option of Cerkote in Graphite Black, Sniper Grey or Desert Tan at no additional cost. Other colors may incur charges. Pistol and rimfire cans get the tougher oven cure Cerakote. Due to the higher temperatures rifle suppressors see, they have to be done with air cure Cerakote.

My packaging is fairly basic, but clean, and each will include a manual. Rifle cans aren't really serviceable with the welded cores, but will include a wrench for the core. Phoenix cans include a double-ended wrench for the end cap and piston housing, and an acetyl rod for driving the baffle stack out. I haven't patterned out a tool for the rimfire cans, as they can be taken down with a 15/16" or 24mm 12 point wrench or socket, assuming you're unable to unscrew them by hand.



They'll all carry a lifetime warranty against defects or failure from normal, approved use. Of course, baffle strikes, overheating failures or other abuse will result in repair costs. I'm setting the temperature ceiling for the rifle cans at 900° F, the pistol and rimfire critters at 600° F. These are the temperatures at which the respective materials start to suffer.

I'm trying to build as many of these as I can to stock, but materials aren't cheap, and every single one is hand made on manual machines, so it takes awhile. Hopefully I'll be able to swing CNC in the not-too-distant future, but I'm a working class guy!

Let me know what ya'll think!

Oops, meant to post in NFA. If we can move it............

I suppose I should have put more photos up....

These are what the Valkyrie and Furtivus baffle stacks look like:



They are trued and threaded after welding.

This is the unassembled Phoenix XLV



The Phoenix on a 1911



Valkyrie 30 on an AR-15



Furtivus 224 on my M16 post sample with 10.5" upper



If you can make it out, the two are labeled opposite what they are as production cans. I decided Valkyrie was more appropriate for the heavier duty suppressor.

I actually don't have a photo of the Lynx monocore, but it looks very much like this titanium .30 cal prototype I did

As an aside, it's been an interesting journey over the last 5 months to get here. I've produced no less than 40 prototypes, a few of which I destroyed in testing, others had the guts discarded because I didn't feel they worked well enough to keep around and pay for new housings for the next one. I started out really focusing on monocore designs, but in the end, I determined they just don't work that well except on .22 LR. Many of them are hearing safe, but noticeably snappier than stacked baffle cans, and always more first round pop. It's perhaps most evident when comparing the Phoenix XLV to a 1.5" x 8.0" monocore I called the Talon 45. It's really pretty with it's flame anodized sleeve, but I was able to make a shorter, lighter, quieter suppressor using indexed 60° cone baffles.

The one exception to the rule is my 12.5 ounce, 1.5" x 10.0" Phantom, an aluminum monocore rifle suppressor with an integral titanium helix brake





It's actually impressively quiet on my 24" .25-06. I developed it to be a lightweight hunting can, and I may produce it, compete with the likes of the SiCo Harvester. But it does heat up fast, needs a few minutes after 5 rounds of full power rifle. Again, hunting suppressor!

I had tried various approaches with stacked baffles, too, things like spacers to cut down on materials and machine time, played with other alloys like 416 and 8620 because they're less expensive and easier to machine than 17-4 PH. In the end, there's a good reason most high quality production cans are built the way they are, using the materials they do. Ergo, my designs aren't vastly different from a technical standpoint.

We'll see how much more they evolve as time goes on, but I'm very pleased with the results I've achieved. It'd be nice to be able to make the cool designs on housings and monocores that are possible with CNC, and it would definitely increase my production capacity, but I don't know how much I can actually improve the performance. We've played with many, many cans that have some really interesting profiles on cores and baffles, but in the end, it seems to be more aesthetic than anything, because one doesn't really work much better than the next. Which is why my focus has been more on weight. Having a pig of a can on the end of your boomstick is no fun, and 2 or 3 ounces can make quite a difference-especially on handguns.

Anyway, I'll shut up now

Hokie_PhD said:

Nice, it’s a shame that we didn’t get suppressors off of the NFA before Vegas and Florida. Seeing these I really would love to have one but I’m not ready to setup a trust and pay a tax. But who knows in a few months!

Btw if you want rough numbers on how effective these are there are dB meter apps for smart phones. They’re nowhere near as good as a real dB meter but you might find that you can at least get some general info if you find one that can go high enough. Oh and many are free!

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Yeah, there are lots of cheaper meters, too, but like the phones, they can't pick up the impulse noise. It's really more useful to just have several people listening while I compare them to production cans with known dB ratings. Also, dB isn't the whole story. It's good for a sales pitch, but cans that are "hearing safe" intensity wise can still be offensive to the ears, which a meter won't tell you.

Telekinesis said:

They're also a good group who enjoy good machining. Off the top of my head there's a group working on manufacturing form 1 60mm mortars, a group wildcattig a 9x39mm copy, and a guy who made a one off Welrod. I'm sure they'd love to see the work that went into these cans!

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May be an "unlisted" site I'm already on. My hand made prototype firearms is what got me started here, but where the cans take between 5 and 18 hours each (hoping to get my efficiency up!), the guns were well over 100, so no way I could make money doing that. People have begged me to produce my pack rifles, but they'd have to sell for over five grand, or I'd be losing money from the word go on manual machines. My goal with those was to sell a design to a manufacturer, but the universal answer was either that they wouldn't even xamine an unpatented design, or that they couldn't keep up with demand for current products.

Odd Job said:

The primary problem with sound pressure meters is the rise time. I read a very good article by Dr Phil Dater on this subject and it is not a simple matter to compare the suppressed sound pressure levels of these cans. You need good equipment, preferably with a rise time less than 20 microseconds. In this area the older analogue meters are better then the current digital ones.

See here:

http://www.larsondavis.com/ContentStore/mktg/LD_Docs/Firearm_Sound_Briefing.pdf

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Thanks for that link! Lots of useful information in there!

I've been shopping, but there isn't a lot out there for high precision meters on the used market, and I just can't afford new right now. If I could find a good used analog meter for $500 or $600, I'd grab it in a heartbeat, but most don't have the range I need. I've sunk a lot into materials and tooling to build all the cans. Carbide inserts that are $3-$5 each and end mills that cost $10 or $15 don't seem too bad, but when they're having to be replaced several times per suppressor, it adds up quick. Working with the stainless on the rifle cans, I'll smoke 2 or 3 CCMT inserts, 3-4 MGMN inserts, and usually burn through a CNMG on all 4 cutting edges. That's just life cutting tough materials on manual, low speed machines without coolant flooding while trying to make decent time. Likewise, $2-$4 per inch of Ti tube and $25-$30 per foot of 17-4 when you're gobbling up 7-10" of tube and 18"+ stainless for each one.

This is also why some of the budget companies can afford to sling all aluminum cans really cheap. Not only is the material far less expensive, but it cuts really fast and doesn't wear tooling much. I can knock down aluminum baffles using a 60° countersink for the inside of the cone in about 3 minutes each. The 1.355" 17-4 baffles for the Valkyrie? 3 times the material cost, and about 15-18 minutes per if I'm hustling and doing many at once, roughing them out and then doing finish operations on another machine where I do the same op on 20 or 30 baffles, then change set up for the next op.

OK, poll time-

What color to anodize the aluminum baffles in the Phoenix and Ocelot? I know black is the norm, which is why I'm leaning a different direction. I haven't finished all of them to do a line up yet, but I'm really diggin' the dark red. I tested it on an Ocelot baffle that mic'd out too thin. These are .925" OD, by the way, so don't judge the tool marks too harshly!

Odd Job said:

Can the anodising wear off?

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Any surface treatment can wear off, but I'm doing a pretty thick anodic layer, 1.5-2 mil by time in the sulfuric bath using the 720 rule. It's type II (You really can't dye Type III, and the controls to do true type III are significant), so not as tough as "milspec" hard coated parts due to the larger cells of type II regardless of thickness, but far superior to natural finish. Though anodizing is not really measureable as a hardness due to the substrate crushing in hardness testing, if you were to put numbers to it, type II or III ends up between 60-70 Rc, about 5 times harder than untreated 7075-T651.

Just like any anodized part, if you attack it to clean with things like hobby knife blades and screwdrivers, you can "break through", which is really damaging the material underneath to where the hard oxide layer has no bonding surface, like chrome peeling from dented or bent material.

Havok7416 said:

I guess it doesn't matter to me other than I think a brighter color might help to identify soot if these are going into a user-serviceable can.

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It's easiest to see it on natural aluminum. It won't adhere to the anodized surface as much. But definitely gonna be more visible on lighter colors than black.

Odd Job said:

So in effect there's not much risk of the anodising coming off, leaving unwanted play between the baffle stack and the outer sleeve. That was my main concern.

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No. It would be more likely to develop slop from untreated aluminum going in and out of the Ti housing through the threaded section.

All of my serviceable cans have .003"-.006" baffle clearance with the housing. Any tighter, getting them in and out is extremely difficult, especially past the threads. They are clamped down tight against each other by the end cap, and on the rimfires, virtually no carbon makes it to the outside of them. A little on the Phoenix XLV, since the booster vents against the housing. The Phoenix IX housing does get pretty dirty inside with the K baffles, though.

Odd Job said:

Regarding the colour, I suggest taking a leaf out of UK Custom Shop's book, and setting up colours based on calibre. For example they use purple anodizing on their rimfire diffusers. It is useful in circumstances where you might be able to have one size sleeve but different baffle stacks or diffusers, depending on calibre.

See here for an example of what UK Custom Shop did:

http://www.wildcatrifles.co.uk/wildcat-predator.html

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That's not possible here in the US due to ridiculous regulations that consider each baffle a suppressor on their own. Except for a couple models specifically approved as modular with variable length, you cannot add baffles or tube length to a suppressor, and certainly can't keep an extra baffle stack around. And the only thing you can change vis-a-vis caliber are end caps or mounts.

greyling22 said:

My 22 can guts are gray and black after just a few hundred rounds, so a color might just set off how dirty they are. That said, the surefire Ryder has red baffles, and my deadair mask has gold baffles. Not sure how they make stainless gold, but I kind of dig it.

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17-4 turns a bronze-gold when heat treated.

Yes, they get dirty fast. It's more about the aesthetics for prospective buyers. It's the same process for any color, so makes no difference to me from a manufacturing standpoint whether it's black or any shade of the rainbow.