Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters quiet shooting w/o silencers?

I would like to eventually have a home on a few acres where I can shoot my guns on my property. But if the neighbors are too close they would likely object to my shooting. So I wonder if someone has figured out a way to drastically reduce the noise caused by gunfire without using a silencer. I do not know much about it but an initial idea is to try to shoot through some sort of a muffler. Any ideas? Thanks, Rufous.

CB shorts in a .22 rimfire are quieter than my pellet gun. I've seen set ups where guys shoot through plastic barrels with that egg crate foam in it. Tires lined up (shooting through where the rims would go) should reduce sound as well. You can't silence anything supersonic, but you can reduce the noise.

You can load most cartridges to be quiet. Usually small charges of pistol powders.

If you want to shoot your regular loads.....I have seen a setup where the shooter set up a row of old tires like a tube and shot through the center of them. Supposed to act like the baffles of a suppressor and really cut the noise. Don't know how effective it is.

Check this post on 6MMBR.com http://6mmbr.websitetoolbox.com/post?id=2324580&highlight=tire

Had a similar situation in Bridgewater, NY, where I owned an old farmhouse and 20 acres of prime woodchuck pasture, right at the edge of town with houses on either side and all down the street (eigth house south of the intersection of Rte 8 and 22 if anybody cares).

Made a muffler out of plywood, chicken wire and fiberglass insulation. Basically a long square tube lined with the insulation with a small open tube in the middle. It was eight feet long and really heavy, but a .223 fired in one end was quieter than an unmuffled .22 rifle.

Had it on legs and casters and positioned it in the open door of the barn behind the house, facing out onto woodchuck territory.

Helluva "can", you can picture me pushing this big coffin looking thing around and aiming it at some unsuspecting chuck ,but it did work.

I know of a guy that used some 55 gallon drums- two in a row. He made a perforated pipe for the middle and filled the remainder with aluminum lathe turnings. Worked pretty dang good I thought! You can put it on a couple of giant jack stands to make it semi-portable. If it can be permanent, it can be bigger and quieter!

Actually, the real solution is to buy someplace that isn't near people.

I've shot three hogs, plus some other critters, in my front yard and I have a 25 yard berm set up right outside the front door. If I get a few more hogs, the nearest neighbors, about 1/2 mile away, will probably give me some sort of hog eradication medal!

Here's my wife and #1 grandson shooting in the front yard.



Another option is explained here http://guns.connect.fi/gow/gunwriters.html

About 20 years or ago there was an article in one of the major mags about a gun writer who built a permanent shooting platform with a baffled "tunnel" section to shoot through. IIRC, the noise abatement was such that the neigbors heard the equivalent of a car door slamming shut.

When making baffles, be aware that unburnt powder kernels are routinely ejected from the muzzle of high-powered cartridge rifles. When it accumulates, they may become cause for your home owner's insurance to rise.... FWIW, Dutch.

Rufous, with the same idea in mind, I designed such a baffle box silencer but never built it. FWIW I was going to line the long box with fire resistant accoustic tile or foam rubber. Then install an alternating loose series of carpet squares and foam rubber, cut with different diameter holes through the center of each, with a stiffer baffle of plywood or metal every foot or two.

The top of the box would open, with the baffles attached/hung so that I could remove them and try different spacing and materials. The smallest diameter hole would be on each end to try to contain the sound inside the box, but large enough to allow a scoped rifle to function through the center hole. I didn't get far enough along to find out how big a problem flammable materials would be. Someone posted here a few years ago with a photo of such a silencer box that extended from the shooting bench in his shooting shed.

Paco Kelly (Kelley?) did a pretty good bit of load development with light loads and I used to have some data for loads that made a LOT more noise when they hit the target than when they exited the barrel of my 21" 44mag barrel.

Someone told me about it and I found it with google a few years ago. I don't know if he still publishes the loads.

I'm pretty sure it was on leveraction.com or something like that.

Using 231 or Unique in 44 mag rifle barrels with cast bullets, I've achieved almost silent loads over the years. You have to be VERY careful that bullets EXIT THE BARREL. I found that a Thompson Contender with a 21" 44mag barrel was EXCELLENT for this and I developed the habit of EVERY TIME I opened the action I'd look down the barrel because eventually at low charge weights and pressures you'll stick one in the barrel.

DANGER!!! DANGER!!! DANGER!!! USE THIS INFORMATION AT YOUR OWN RISK!!! DANGER!!! DANGER!!! DANGER!!!

If I remember correctly, ANY gun mounted noise supressor MUST be licensed even if home made. I'm pretty sure it involves a $200 stamp and an FBI background check.

$bob$

I believe that was Ric Jamison in Oregon. It apparently worked very well.

Veral Smith has also written about quiet loads in revolvers and his formula matches what you list - a heavy bullet with a light charge of fast burning powder. IIRC he mentions velocities in the 600-700 fps range but could be misremembering the velocity part. It is in his book "Jacketed Performance With Cast Bullets".

Have not tried that per se but just this past weekend was working with Unique and 231 in a Marlin .44 Mag using 429421's and 429244's. Wouldn't exactly call the report quiet but it certainly was not ear splitting either. With that 20" barrel it's easy to go supersonic even with middlin' loads of those powders.

rufous:

A Lofty Place to Shoot, by Don L. Henry, Handloader's Digest 1997, pages 44 through 51, is a well illustrated article that thoroughly explains his resolution of the "quiet shooting / neighborhood shooting" problem. Don L. Henry based his work partly on Range Sound Reducer, by Ken Waters, Handloader's Digest 1996, pages 191 through 194.

THE LOAD Or What You Can Do with 13 Grains of Red Dot, by C.E. Harris, Handloader's Digest Twelfth Edition, pages 84 through 86, explains some lower-cost, lower noise loads for some commonly used cartridges of caliber .30 and up.

I believe that Paco Kelly's web site is leverguns dot com.

Using Google to search for quiet loads will turn up several sites with loads for various calibers.

Thanks for the info guys. I am not wanting to use reduced loads but just to shoot through some sort of baffle system with my full power loads. Rufous.

ruf..,

If shooting .22's, a gallon milk jug or 2 liter bottle taped on the muzzel, will reduce the noise to a level that doesn't sound like a gun being fired. Subsonic or .22 shorts work best, or so I'm told. Personally, I'd never do such a thing

O

I'm yet another reader of that article, or one just like it. Do pay attention to the unburnt powder, as the writer did have an unplanned event due to an accumulation of kernels. Nothing was destroyed, if I recall, but it did sound like an exciting couple of seconds.

Scott

I recall reading about tires hung and the rifle fired through center of the resulting tunnel. I also recall occasionally these caught fire from unburned powder, so perhaps try drilling a hole in the bottom of each and sluice them out occasionally and dispose of the slurry.

The 2-liter bottle thing I did try, and had very limited bad results. The impact of the bullets and the muzzle blast pretty well blew off the bottle. And the bullet hitting the jug was pretty noisy. Another downside is you can't use your sights with a gallon jug taped on the muzzle.

However, when I was working in LE, I was involved in a case where a murder-for-hire guy used one on a 9mm Uzi, IIRC. I don't know how muffled it did, but he managed to kill a guy at very close range.

CBs are pretty quiet, and I've piled up pigeons with them. The shorts and the longs are equally quiet, the longs are for function in certain actions, got the same amount of power.

Anything that attaches to the muzzle of a firearms and is intended to reduce the report is a silencer (even if it doesn't work as intended). Be careful.

I've made a couple of 'baffle stands' for testing loads where the neighbors might complain Something as simple as a 55gal drom with a 12 inch hole cut in both ends works. Lining the inside with egg carton foam works really well. You can add plywood baffles and get the sound down to an amazing level. The more you can expand and cool the propellant gasses in a controlled environment, the better.

It doesn't just work for firearms.

Looks like Tank sex . . . . . .

But I get the point (so to speak)

BMT

Without doubt, that's the craziest thing I've ever seen.