Suppressing Revolvers

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MachIVshooter

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It's something that I've been meaning to get around to, finally found the motivation and a little bit of time to do thread job on one of my Hi Standard Sentinels. barrel is internally threaded 3/8-40 with a custom male-male adapter that's 1/2-28 on the other side.

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The results? Not far from what I expected. The sound pressure is reduced, but quite a lot escapes the cylinder gap, and that didn't change by a significant amount using shim stock to keep the gap tighter during firing. It metered between 137-141 dBA with all .22 ammo other than CCI Quiets, which hovered around 129. Subsonic, standard velocity, high velocity - all in that range.

It also made no difference using the full sized 5.5" Ocelot or 3.0" Ocelot Micro. On a semi-auto pistol, those cans meter on average 119 and 128 respectively with with subsonic ammunition.

Conclusion? You can knock it down, but what comes out the cylinder gap is just barely hearing safe with .22s, and I'm certain would ring your ears good with anything bigger. While I don't consider this one to have been a waste of time, I'm not going to be threading any of the .32s, .38's or .44s with swing out cylinders. I do, however, still have plans to gas seal one of the Iver Johnson or H&R top breaks I picked up for that reason, which I'll post all about when I get around to it!

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the nagant might be a good gun for this sort of piddling around. the cylinder is suppose to press against the forcing cone when firing.
There isn't really a forcing cone in the conventional sense. When the cylinder moves forward, the end of the barrel fits into a recess in the cylinder. The cartridge case is long enough that the end of the case actually protrudes forward into the barrel making the barrel part of the chamber and allowing the cartridge case to completely seal the discharge.
 
Screenshot_20191230-221643~2.jpg Don't remember where I screen grabbed this from, but short of a nagant style system this is probably the only way to supress a revolver. The covers form a chamber around the cylinder gap.
 
the nagant might be a good gun for this sort of piddling around. the cylinder is suppose to press against the forcing cone when firing.

The Russians developed a Silenced 1895 Nagant decades ago because they realized that wierd camming action might allow for silencing it. The KGB used to use them to ....uh....well, "disappear" annoying people in back alleys.

Dan Wesson also developed a revolver that could be silenced, as the barrel could be screwed down to press against the front of the cylinder, which meant you had to cock the hammer first, lock the barrel down, fire, then unscrew the barrel to cock it again. So far as I know, while he developed it for clandestine services it was never adopted by any ..... largely I guess because it's an answer to a question no one askes, since suppressed semiautos are pretty much what are used since they're more practical.
 
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the nagant might be a good gun for this sort of piddling around. the cylinder is suppose to press against the forcing cone when firing.

The entire Nagant cylinder does shift forwards while the trigger is being pulled. But the gas seal actually comes from the Nagant brass. The brass completely encases the bullet. When the bullet is fired the front of the brass mushrooms out (like a shot gun shell) and seals against the forcing cone. I put a paper towel over my Nagant when I fired it once out of curosity... there were amazingly no powder marks on the paper towel.

If you pull and release a Nagant trigger too fast the brass is difficult to eject from the cylinder because the end of the brass isn't contained by the forcing cone when it mushrooms out and it mushrooms to bigger than the cylinder bore.

20 years ago the Nagants were the perfect revolver to silence... they sold for $79. I think they go for a good bit more these days.


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I just watched the video... I guess it already aludes to how the case seals to the forcing cone.


I own a Nagant. The trigger pull is NOT 437 pounds!!!! It's more like 439.8865477 pounds!!! :neener::evil: ..... ;) :rofl:
Pfffft... I have never had a problem pulling the DA trigger on my Nagant. It is a softer DA trigger than my Webley revolver. A little DA practice with a Nagant would probably do a lot of good for some of the trigger wimps around here... maybe save them from comrade Stalin sending them to the gulag to work on their finger strength! :)

Of course the advantage of a supressed revolver is low noise while leaving no brass at the scene... this sounds like somthing the KGB would do... but they would probably use selenium bullets or simular.
 
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..... Pfffft... I have never had a problem pulling the DA trigger on my Nagant. It is a softer DA trigger than my Webley revolver. A little DA practice with a Nagant would probably do a lot of good for some of the trigger wimps around here... maybe save them from comrade Stalin sending them to the gulag to work on their finger strength! :)

Of course the advantage of a supressed revolver is low noise while leaving no brass at the scene... this sounds like somthing the KGB would do... but they would probably use selenium bullets or simular.

I was really only kidding about the trigger pull ... in response to a post earlier than mine. I can't speak for the Webley, but the Nagant, while not having the best trigger, also does not have the worst. As to the KGB using selenium bullets, I doubt it. I think that either they were really good at disappearing corpses, or that people were too intimidated by them to investigate soggy corpses with .32 caliber holes in the back of the skull.

Or both.:evil:
 
agree ! the other vid with the well endowed lady is very quiet with that load with a better suppressor. As long as I have your attention sir; I have been wondering about those old Sionic design dual chamber suppressors with the blast chamber having the ports to baffle chambers . I notice that is no longer done , my experience with that design on MAC 10s was it was not so efficient but maybe that was just .45 ACP and an open bolt ?

 
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agree ! the other vid with the well endowed lady is very quiet with that load with a better suppressor. As long as I have your attention sir; I have been wondering about those old Sionic design dual chamber suppressors with the blast chamber having the ports to baffle chambers . I notice that is no longer done , my experience with that design on MAC 10s was it was not so efficient but maybe that was just .45 ACP and an open bolt ?



COaxial designs can work very well in some applications, I do a fair number of recores that way when they're meant for PCC/SMG use. But they're too large on OD to be practical for handguns, and not efficient with high pressure rifle rounds.

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This one is convertible, can have it vent to coaxial at the muzzle end for lower back pressure with blowback guns, or the distal end for less uncorking pop on locked breech hosts.

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The surplus ammo for the nagant is supersonic that is why you are getting a down range crack.

edit: looks like he was using ppu but it sure seemed hotter than the stuff I have. May just be a really really crappy suppressor did say it was made for a mac.

The weak ppu ammo is very subsonic at about 650fps it would be quiet with a suppressor.
 
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There are 2 different properties which make the Nagant pretty much the only effectively suppressible revolver. While pulling the trigger a mechanism pushes the cylinder up against the barrel removing nearly all of the cylinder gap. And the ammo developed for the Nagant has a kind of roll crimp at the end of the cartridge, which "unfolds" into the forcing cone as the bullet is leaving the cartridge, thus forming a gas-tight seal between cylinder and barrel.

Changing an existing revolver to add a mechanism which manually reduces the cylinder gap would be a giant hassle, but maybe there are other ways to limit the amount of cylinder gap, or potentially some revolvers already have so little cylinder gap that they would be suitable? All one would then have to do is enlarge and lengthen the forcing cone to create the additional room for the unfolding of a lengthened cartridge, which isn't too difficult for someone with a lathe and milling machine. Let's say you have a .38 Special revolver with a very narrow cylinder gap, narrow enough to be suitable for adapting it to suppressor use. Seeing as a .357 Magnum cartridge is approximately 4mm longer than that of .38 Special, empty .357 Magnum brass would most likely suffice to handload the roll crimped ammo needed to make a gas-tight seal between the cylinder and barrel. You would probably need to make a custom die to roll crimp the end of the cartridge just like Nagant ammo, but that should be doable for someone with the same lathe and milling machine needed to enlarge and lengthen the forcing cone. If this would indeed all work as I suspect, then you could probably even do it with a revolver in a larger caliber, such as .44 Special. In order to be effectively suppressible you can only use subsonic ammo, and in .32 caliber that's indeed going to be pretty meager. But subsonic ammo .44 caliber would have a fair bit more energy and definitely punch larger holes in someone.
 
but maybe there are other ways to limit the amount of cylinder gap, or potentially some revolvers already have so little cylinder gap that they would be suitable? All one would then have to do is enlarge and lengthen the forcing cone to create the additional room for the unfolding of a lengthened cartridge, which isn't too difficult for someone with a lathe and milling machine. Let's say you have a .38 Special revolver with a very narrow cylinder gap, narrow enough to be suitable for adapting it to suppressor use. Seeing as a .357 Magnum cartridge is approximately 4mm longer than that of .38 Special, empty .357 Magnum brass would most likely suffice to handload the roll crimped ammo needed to make a gas-tight seal between the cylinder and barrel.

You would have a single shot, and one which cannot be reloaded without removing the barrel or risking damage trying to shear the case mouth off by beating the cylinder out in the case of solid frame revolvers.

That's why the Nagant cylinder moves fore and aft.
 
You would have a single shot, and one which cannot be reloaded without removing the barrel or risking damage trying to shear the case mouth off by beating the cylinder out in the case of solid frame revolvers.

That's why the Nagant cylinder moves fore and aft.
Ah, yeah that was pretty stupid of me. I hadn't even thought of the fact that once fire the mouth of the case would have extended into the forcing cone of the barrel and thus prevent the cylinder from turning. Any idea if there are other revolvers beside the Nagant which have a cylinder which is pressed forward during the firing sequence and back again after it has been fired?
 
Any idea if there are other revolvers beside the Nagant which have a cylinder which is pressed forward during the firing sequence and back again after it has been fired?

I can't think of any.

Like I said in my OP, I do plan to make a suppressed top break at some point, because that's really the only other revolver design with which it could be done effectively, since there is a way to (mostly) seal the cylinder gap by closing off the front of the cylinder. The question there is how much noise will leak out past the other cartridges/empties in the cylinder. We'll find out when I have the time to build it!
 
I can't think of any.

Like I said in my OP, I do plan to make a suppressed top break at some point, because that's really the only other revolver design with which it could be done effectively, since there is a way to (mostly) seal the cylinder gap by closing off the front of the cylinder. The question there is how much noise will leak out past the other cartridges/empties in the cylinder. We'll find out when I have the time to build it!


Years ago Dan Wesson did make a revolver that could be suppressed. It was designed so the barrel could be manually screwed down to take a shot, then unscrewed to allow the cylinder to rotate .... and so forth. IIRC it was made for use by intelligence services like the C. I. A. It never did get much attention as it was limited to single action given the mechanism, and, really, the truth is silenced revolvers are the "answer to a question no one ever asks;" people just want silenced semiauto (or full auto if you're a U. S. Navy SEAL).
 
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