How to silence an AEG?

War Machine 539

I am working on my new AEG, I haven't skirmished in a good while and I want something special! I have a design I have never seen done before, I have sourced all my parts, but on a practical side I need it to have one characteristic - it needs to be quiet. Really quiet. I have no idea how to achieve this with an AEG!

I have heard some say shim the gears, but I must be honest and say Im not familiar gearboxes! ( Im scared to touch them in fact ) Another tip I have heard is rubber seals, can anyone shed some light on these methods? Any other suggestions would be useful too!

Can anyone help me?

NakedDex

It's not really possible, to be honest. Most of the sound comes from three points; the muzzle, the upper receiver and the pistol grip. The muzzle sound is simply a loud echo of what happened at the other end of the barrel (ie, the piston hitting home), the sound around the receiver area is the sound of the piston and gears cycling, and the sound from the pistol grip is your motor spinning.

Putting a proper Madbull suppressor on the muzzle will give a decent reduce in the high end frequency of the noise produced from that point, but don't expect miracles.

Around the receiver and grip, you're pretty stuck with what you have. Shimming the gears to run smoother and fitting a silent piston head will make a difference but, again, don't expect huge results. All you're going to do is dampen the high frequency noise slightly.
The most effective course of action is to shim well, fit bearings if not present, fit a silent piston head and rig the gearbox for the highest rate of fire possible. Even if you don't want a high rate of fire set up, operating on semi with a 25rps device is going to give you the least amount of noise by virtue of operating the gearbox for the shortest amount of time.
Think of it like trying to remove Velcro quietly; you can slowly pull it off at a sort of quiet level of noise over a few seconds, or you can pull the lot off in a quarter second producing a sharper noise. It's harder to track a short sound, and your other upgrades will dampen some of it anyway.

The motor - again, high frequency, is tragically difficult to do anything with. The motor plate is vented for cooling, but that's also where the sound primarily eminates from. A proportion comes through the plastic itself, but it's dampened by the fact that your hand will cover it.
The best option here is simply a good, fast motor. If you can have your motor spool time perfectly match your piston cycle time, it'll be masked by the gearbox sound.


I'm going out on a limb here and deducing, from your comment above, that you're basing this on an M4/16 body. That hampers your ability to do anything with acoustic wadding really. All you can do is make the best of a bad situation.

War Machine 539

Thanks for the reply! Im actually using a G36c body . . . . . . . . Not all that roomy either! I will definately take your advice! I cant use the Madbull silencer though, I am using one double the size as a barrel extension, masking a longer type tightbore! You seem like one of the technically minded on here, would you be able to recommend anyone on here to do some work on the gearbox? Im terrified of them! Im planning on getting my hands on a wreck soon enough and learning from that, but im buying all the parts for this brand new and I really dont want to fcuk it up. Is it possible to remove the foam from a Madbull silencer, or structure of it also help with sound suppression?

NakedDex

If you're using a silencer as a barrel extension, you've removed all chance of using a silencer in any other way. The barrel will go straight through without modification to the suppressor, but you'll be effectively bypassing the entire suppressor so you'll have to make the choice between a long tightbore and a regular tightbore.

As for the gearbox, there's a few shops that'll do it for you, and a few guys on here too (Leftyflip, for example, does internal upgrades).

War Machine 539

Excellent, thanks a lot!

NakedDex

I should mention, also, that barrel length isn't everything. A good tightbore, mated with a good hop unit and hop rubber, will be just as accurate at a standard length as one four inches longer or so. By all means, do it if you feel you want to, but if you do want as quiet a system as possible, I'd forego the longer tightbore in favour of the effective suppressor.
Another option is to add a short barrel extension to your barrel, before fitting the silencer. This is something I've done to one of my own rifles, where the short extension, plus the length of the flash-hider the suppressor attaches to, is enough to effectively hide the longer-than-standard internal barrel and still allow effective use of the suppressor. The suppressor in question is also a Madbull, and makes a phenomenal difference to the high-end "crack" produced by the rifle firing. It's still not exactly a silent rifle, but it's certainly quiet enough for me.

Bear in mind that, while a rifle may not be silent when you're firing it, consider what it sounds like from 20 yards away. You'll always hear an AEG firing, but if the sound produced has enough of the high-end frequency dampened, it'll be very hard to pinpoint the location with hearing alone. This is the same principle RS suppressors work on. Contrary to popular belief, a suppressed weapon (not silenced, that's a Hollywood term) is not silent. It still produces a reasonable amount of noise, but the lack of a flash and the virtually complete absence of high and mid-range noise, makes the firing location difficult to pinpoint when close, and difficult to hear at all when much further away.

Set your rifle up with the upgrades I've suggested, then when you're next at a site with it, have a friend take it 20 or 30 yards downrange (average enough engagement range) and pop off a few rounds from somewhere you can't see him/her. That's the true test. If you're satisified with it at that point, you've achieved your goal.