See Through Suppressor in Super Slow Motion (110,000 fps) - Smarter Every Day 177

I have been wanting to make this video for years. A see-through suppressor with a high speed camera—COME ON! This is awesome! The problem is I didn't have access to licenses or the equipment necessary to make it. All that changed when I met Steve.

Hey, it's me Dustin, welcome back to Smarter Every Day. I'm with Steve and Steve makes suppressors, right?

"That's right. What's the name of the company?"

"Soteria Soteria Suppressors." (Here to fire off suppression)

Okay, this is something we've been wantin' to do FOREVER. This is a Good old Boy Alabama deal. I've contacted Steve; he's contacted me. He likes the high-speed camera, I like the concept of see-through suppressors, so we worked out a little deal here.

When you say, "All right, so what are we gonna do?"

"We're gonna fire our suppressors using a cast acrylic as a casing. We can actually see what transpires inside the suppressor once the round leaves the barrel and the compressed gases behind it, you know, come on. A barrel creates a pressure wave in the ignition of the gases? We get to see what actually happens as the bullet comes out from the end as it expands."

"So you got this expansion coming over here towards your microphone?"

"Right, right. So I wouldn't expect this pressure field to be symmetric or even spherical. It's gonna be like a lobe, correct? A reverse mushroom. And you can see that if we take the muzzle brake off of it, and you can actually see when the round exits the barrel. Within, of course, you can see that reverse mushroom cloud."

"Oh? That's awesome! The moment we've been waiting for. There we go. This is PTFC seal. Steve would like to say something."

"I can say full disclosure here, we've never fired the .308 with a cast acrylic suppressor before. I think it's gonna break. I do. But my guess is if it does fail, that we're gonna get a failure right here near the thread on the back or the front, and that's because of the stress concentration."

"What kind of thread did you use?"

"It's a sharp-toothed thread, this truncated thread. It's a fine thread. Hopefully, it won't, but if it does, we're gonna get some great high-speed hints."

"The Lexan?"

"There we go, I think it broke where I thought it would. Yeah, my engineering professor didn't lie to me."

"Have you ever seen that?"

"I've never seen that. I've never seen anybody do that before! I've never seen ANYBODY do that before!"

"Mumford people."

"What's Mumford people?"

"Mumford USA. Mumford Alabama."

"Mumford? I don't understand the reference."

"We'd be rednecks. But we design and stuff."

"The fact that it came off had to do with axial stress. Like if once it pressurized that tube, it's pulling the whole can and those threads just couldn't handle that."

"Right, right. Okay, so the one we're about to do is something you actually sell?"

"That's right. And you've never seen it like this?"

"Never have."

"Cool, so this is a .223, and the idea here is to contain the gases in the back and then stop it from exiting with that diamond pattern in the front."

"So if you think about what the suppressor is doing, there are two stages to it. The first one is the capture of the gases on the inside of its expansion volume, and then there's this restriction to flow to keep those gases inside the can so you don't let them flow out. There's this really cool thing that happens when you spend a lot of time designing things; eventually, you start to see things, and you just kind of have a gut feel like engineering judgment. On this next suppressor, Steve had that gut feel right before we pulled the trigger. He can hear him yell out, it's pretty fun. He didn't want to shoot this. I convinced him to do it because it was the prettiest one in my mind. I thought I could see more of the gases."

"What, Steve didn't tell me is that this was one of the first conceptual designs Soteria made back before they'd done much research. He also didn't tell me that he had no intentions of shooting this one, so he made it out of thinner acrylic as a display piece. It's got like this claw built into it, and that claw kind of looks like it's going to grab some of that gas and not let it go. So I'm pretty pumped about that."

"You ready?"

"Ready to fire!"

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I did. I said full disclosure, and you went on with the test anyway. I said it was my favorite because this one's got claws. It's my favorite design."

"And you knew it was gonna?"

"How did you know it was gonna fail in all seriousness?"

"Well, it was a smaller diameter on that .308. It works well on the .223, but on the .308, we need more capacity. That's a 30, that's a 35-millimeter suppressor. It needs to be like 41 millimeters. This is a developmental test, so let's see what we can learn."

"Instead of using a segmented baffle system, this type of suppressor uses a monocore design so it can be easily cleaned in the field. We fired another round through the monocore without containment so we could see exactly what was happening. As you can see, these flat parts are flexing out from the inside, and they're pushing on the inside of the sleeve, causing a localized stress concentration. This is called destructive testing, and it's my favorite part of engineering."

"Steve obviously knew this was going to break if we used a metal can, and this wouldn't have shattered. But what he did is he weakened one part of the system so that we could see how strong the other components were. Once you figure that out, you can figure out how to tweak your design, and you can make a really strong overall product without making it too bulky. This is really smart, and it's something that engineers do all the time, and it's one of my favorite things in engineering."

"Okay, that was everything I thought it would be. It was rad! I've got a super cool sponsor to introduce to you today. This is not a normal ad. This is a really big deal for the Sandlin household. We have been hoping that HelloFresh would sponsor Smarter Every Day for a really long time. I'll let my wife, who talked about this on the podcast, I'll let her explain how our relationship with HelloFresh started."

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"Yes, and other meal planning companies have sent us meals, and I did not like the setup or the food options. So I went back to paying for HelloFresh because I enjoyed it better."

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"A couple of things real quick. The next couple of videos I'm super excited about. If you've never considered subscribing—if you think this one earned it, it might be a good time. Also, number two, if you want to see just more raw slow-mo, the second channel Smarter Every Day - Gordon McGladdery did the sound design. There's more sounds and slow-mo over there. Go check it out; it's really rad."

"Let's go say bye to Steve."

"Alright, that's it! I hope you enjoyed this episode of Smarter Every Day. Big thanks to Steve from Soteria for letting us come out and shoot your stuff! So probably that enjoyed it—it was a great time! So we're gonna do some design work here."

"That's right. So we learned someday that we're gonna try other things based on it. What do you think?"

"I believe it. Awesome, man. Thanks. Science keeps moving, dude. It's gonna be good."

"Awesome! I'm Destin, getting Smarter Every Day. Have a good one."

"Do you have a guess?"

"I'm guessing you're wrong."

"Okay, you know I'll bet you coke on it?"

"A coke?"

"Alright, so it's a good bet—ya a coke!"