I'm thinking about getting a suppressor for a .300 Win Mag. I saw a suppressor that has what they call an "anchor brake" on the end of it, to reduce recoil. But don't all suppressors reduce recoil automatically? And What if I simply mount a muzzle brake with threads for the suppressor to screw onto? Will the brake work inside the suppressor to reduce recoil?

Yes.  A lot.

Direct thread / QD attachment you probably won’t be able to discern the difference in felt recoil.  

The right can will drop a .300 WM to less than a .308 in felt recoil.

Yes they do for sure.

Massively, in my experience. Couldn't say offhand if it's the extra weight or the brake/recoil effect, but you sure notice it.

My moments are mag dumps in a FAL and a G3.

So even without that fancy "anchor brake," would you say it still helped a lot?

Thanks for the advice, by the way. I don't want to have to keep wearing earplugs half in and half out while deer hunting. Yeah, 300 mag is a bit overpowered. But better overpowered than underpowered.

You'll still be wearing earplugs unless you go .300BO. .308 suppressed is still a fuck and a half to your unshielded ears.

But .308 suppressed is "tolerable". and with ears on it's nothing.

I shot an Omega AR in 300WM w/suppressor, very soft shooting.

I have silencers on all of my rifles and they are beneficial in many ways. A silencer will reduce the "perceived" or "felt" recoil, it will not actually reduce the recoil. What a silencer does is it increases the duration of time that the recoil impulse is felt, it does not actually decrease the free recoil energy. However, when shooting with a silencer on a decent center fire rifle caliber the recoil feels as if it were cut in half, let me explain.

Imagine the amount of energy from a swinging baseball bat at the highest speed that you can swing it with your arms. Lets say that is 120 foot pounds of energy. If that bat were to smack into a brick wall it would really be felt by the bat swinger. Now imagine that that same person that swing the bat slowly pushed a 120 pound weight across a floor very slowly. That would not hurt the pusher at all. These are extreme examples, but given to illustrate my point.

A silencer will make your big bore center fire rifle feel as though it recoils much, much less...

That's awesome.

Yes, the can will make your rifle shoot easier on your shoulder. What few people talk about is "tuning" the can to the barrel and caliber. In an "over gassed" rifle, the can will "tune" the recoil while reducing sound.

They give gas a place to expand & add a hunk of weight to the end of the barrel so of course they reduce recoil.

I fully agree that suppressors greatly reduce recoil on just about everything.  I shoot a lot of suppressed 300wm, 300wsm, 260rem, and 45/70.  To address the anchor brake specifically, I had one on my Hybrid for my 45/70.  From shooting with an without the brake back to back, you can hear that the brake makes the sound to the shooter much louder.  I didn't like it at all, and prefer the flat front cap.

1. Yes, a silencer will reduce felt recoil tremendously. My 6.5lb 30-06 kicks less than a .243 shooting light loads. They make that big a difference.

2. In my opinion, anchor brakes are stupid on a can. You already get significant recoil reduction, and lower noise levels. The anchor brake makes the gun LOUDER to the shooter which kinda is pointless.

3. You still get the recoil reduction with a flat cap on the end of the silencer...

4. You WANT to wear hearing protection! It wont be hollywood quiet, unless you are shooting subsonic ammo, which is NOT a good choice for hunting.

5. Get yourself some cheap electronic muffs. It allows you to hear the woods but cancels out the residual noise of the can.

E=(1/2) x MV²
 E is the energy of the bullet plus the energy of the gases out the muzzle
 M is the mass of the rifle setup.
 V is the velocity of the rifle slamming into your shoulder... this is what you FEEL.

Technically, the total recoil impulse of a suppressed gun should be roughly equivalent to that of a gun with a bare muzzle; the bullet and all of the gasses are ejecting 100% forward just as they would through a bare muzzle.  In contrast a gun with a brake seeks to strip most of the gas and divert it to the side (negating it's rearward recoil) or even raking the baffles so the gas is thrown rearward (giving the rifle some forward thrust component).  Actual brakes are WAY WAY better at reducing recoil than suppressors, but suppressors are still very effective recoil reduction devices, even if they are less efficient than brakes.

Where you feel the difference from a suppressor versus a bare muzzle is that cans typically add a decent amount of weight to a gun (typically 8-20%) and the suppressor stretches out the time it takes to dump the gasses to atmosphere.  Increasing the mass of the rifle setup reduces the velocity of the gun hitting your shoulder (E=(1/2) x MV²) and drawing out recoil impulse reduces the peak force experienced by the gun during the recoil impulse (?J=Fdt).  So yes, you will have a reduction in felt recoil with a silencer whether it's a rimfire or a magnum rifle... but still not as much as a brake.  

Also, a brake-mount (inside of a silencer) doesn't change the raw comparison of "brake vs silencer recoil"  because the gas that gets diverted by the brake-mount just ends up going forward all out the front anyways.  However some silencers have brake-endcaps (i.e.: SicO Harvester) and this actually would be like "getting both".

Harvester with anchor brake makes my .30-06 more pleasant

Thanks for breaking it down for me, guys!

I can easily see my impacts on plates as close as 400 yards due to the lack of recoil on my 6CM.

On my 300 win mag, it goes from a kick to a shove, if that makes any sense. Follow up shots are easier.

Are direct thread cans the preferred method to attach to traditional bolt rifles or are their any other mountain solutions that people are using that can also be installed on ARs, etc?

Any QD system can be used on both, but something minimalist like Plan A, Plan B, TBAC tapers, YHM Kurz, or Xeno are ideal to keep weight down.

I have been trying out my Nomad 30 and Vox S on my hunting rifles.  I started with my 30.06 rifles and it seems to make a noticeable difference to me.

I disagree somewhat, KE alone is an inadequate way to look at recoil, especially in this case. Recoil is a direct product of the conservation of momentum.

M1 x V1 = M2 x V2

Or in this case
Mb x Vb + Mg x Vg = Mr x Vr

Where b is bullet, g is gasses, and r is rifle.

As you noted, when you screw on a can, the envelope of the "r" system expands to include the can as well as the rifle, so Mr does increase. The other side of that is that Vg leaving the system becomes the velocity of the gas leaving the muzzle of the can instead of the muzzle of the rifle barrel. A big part of the can's job is delaying gas into a larger container and cooling the gas, increasing V(olume) and lowering T(temperature) in the PV=nRT gas law equation lowers the P(ressure), which in turn lowers the velocity of gas Vg out of the system to ambient.

So a can decreases recoil velocity by increasing system weight, and also decreasing gas exit velocity on the other side of the momentum equation, they aren't just weights on the end of the barrel, recoil-wise.

Good brakes do tend to decrease recoil further by deflecting lots of gas flow perpendicular or mostly perpendicular to recoil force axis. On the other hand, shooting braked rifles sucks, and can still cause damage with earpro, and shooting suppressed rifles is awesome.


As for hunting with a can, I don't use separate  ear pro for the few shots I take when I rifle hunt with a decent can. Is it perfectly "hearing safe"? No probably not, and neither is driving with the windows down or listening to ear buds. Is it a short duration, low repetition threat that's worlds better than taking a shot or two with a bare rifle like probably 90% of hunters do every year? I think so. Especially when the actual NRR number you get from a decent can probably isn't far off from a bare muzzle and generic plugs hastily stuffed in your ears. I always use plugs when banging away with suppressed guns at the range and plugs and muffs when shooting naked though.

Yes, big difference.

But as noted, it doesn't change total energy, but the energy spread over time. We'll just talk about felt recoil, not being technical.

I'd say it reduced 5.56 with an A2 FH 30% by mounting a m4sd.

From 308, adding a muzzle brake might take away 50% of the recoil. Putting a can over that, increased recoil a little, say an overall 45% reduction. The brake can't do its job very well with a can over it, but you have the inherent "reduction" of the can, and the minor effect of the brake.

The recoil with the brake alone is still much sharper.

I have an omega, and do not use the anchor brake. Myself nor a few others could tell the difference in recoil, but the noise is increased a lot as the shooter or bystander.

For shooting extended strings (think 3 gun), while already wearing earpro, I much prefer to leave the silencer on the bench. Let the brake do its job and hold up less weight. Gun doesn't get as dirty either.

Silencers shine in the real world, whether hunting big game, small game, or bad guys.

Great points, thanks for posting the equations.  One thing to add, is that the velocities Vb,Vg,Vr are vectors.  A good muzzle brake doesn't just reflect the gas perpendicular, but actually in the rearward direction.
This means that it basically reverses the sign:

Mb x Vb - Mg x Vg = Mr x Vr

Allowing the force of the gas to actually counteract the force of the bullet.  This is why a brake like the Hypertap can get 84% recoil reduction

In contrast, a suppressor can at best reduce the Vg, causing this term to diminish, but cannot reverse it like a brake

In a simple sense, wouldn't the gases impacting the blast baffle cause forward acceleration of the silencer - thusly the gun as a whole?

Of course that is wholly inefficient, and could only account for a minor fraction of the total rearward acceleration.

In my uneducated observation, the super-effective brakes would seem to be so because of the gas impacting the brake itself as well as redirecting their energy to cause forward acceleration. I reason that the gas has already expended most of it's energy after hitting the surfaces of the brake.

Thinking deeper, I suppose much of the gas does not actually touch the brake, but slides off itself much how air gets caught in the dimples of a golf ball or in the tip of a HP rifle bullet.

You're on the right track, when the momentum is transferred from gas to gun, you can think of it as pushing off, like a swimmer kicking off the wall.

However, this is really just a conservation of momentum problem and thinking about it that way will help to correct your intuition on how efficient it is.

In a nut shell, momentum is conserved. The initial momentum of gun plus bullet is zero, and that never changes. When the bullet and gasses start moving forward, the gun gets an equal and opposite rearward momentum aka recoil.

If the gasses were 100% reflected back in a 180 degree angle, then conservation dictates that all the momentum of the gassss be subtracted from the recoil momentum.

In reality, less than 100% gets reflected and the reflection angle isn't 180 degrees, more like 150 but it's enough that the total gun recoil is 84% less than before. That's hugely efficient!

It tells you that there is a similar amount of momentum in the muzzle blast as the bullet, and by reflecting back even a portion of it by reversing its sign, it subtracts from recoil instead of adding to it.

PV=nRT is not even close to being applicable to combustible flow.  However, yes... there is a temperature decrease and pressure decrease of the gasses to consider that lowers the energy and lowers free velocity of the gas as it comes out of the silencer.  Some of that energy that would have become felt recoil (momentum change) is absorbed by the can by directly in the form of heat.  The materials in the can have a specific heat capacity and energy lost to thermal effects is actually easy to calculate by measuring the per-shot temperature increase and factoring that into the materials' specific heat.  Some energy is converted to entropy, too... you get an an increase in entropy via the Joule-Thompson effect of throttling through the baffle orifices.

I didn't want to get too far into the weeds of where all the energy is going.  I just wanted to express that the integrated impulse of the recoil should be roughly similar  to a rifle with a bare muzzle (minus the "lost" energy you and I mentioned above)... but by and large the drastic difference in recoil that we feel with a silencer has more to do with the weight increase with the can and greatly modified impulse curve (spread out over time) rather than the pressure/temperature differences happening inside the can.

Only time I ever got scoped was with an ACOG ( and its short eye relief) on a .308 SBR.  With the gun's brake-mount, it was awesome. Very flat shooting & very little recoil.  I got used to shooting it nose to charging handle with that ACOG.  We stuck a 20oz 308 silencer on it and that ACOG smacked me right in the glasses the next shot.  The increase in felt recoil even with the 1-1/4 pound silencer hanging on the end was not only noticeable, it was very surprising.

You could have just asked, and I'd have told you shooting 308 with an ACOG was a bad idea... I get whacked by the ACOG on a m16 every shot. Horrible design. Not enough to draw blood or anything, but my eyebrow is quite sore after a range week. Now the 3.5x model used on the m249... excellent optic.

This topic really needs to get summarized and stickied. Pops up way too often.

Per Quickload, pretty much all the combustion has occurred by the time you get to the end of a reasonable length rifle barrel, using a rifle powder, at that point you have hot gasses. So while the ideal gas law isn't perfect for that example (it's not perfect for most cases) it's good enough to illustrate the point on why momentum is reduced.

Cans can increase carrier velocity in semi-autos, with a chunky .308 carrier that is probably why the impulse changed enough for the short eye relief scope to give you a smooch. You've got extra dynamics going on inside a semi-auto, an un-tuned, very over-gassed system might even have higher felt recoil suppressed than bare muzzled, in spite of the added can weight. In a simpler system like a bolt gun though, the can slowing gasses does provide significant recoil reduction, over and above just a decrease in rifle velocity due to the added weight.