Brakes on a hunting gun

KillerBee said:
If you want a real bad case of Tinnitus hunt with people that use muzzle breaks and put one on all of your rifles lol.
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To be fair, plenty of people got tinnitus before brakes were even put on rifles. People are still getting tinnitus from firing a weapon without ear protection. It could be a cumulative effect, or it could happen with one exposure to a muzzle blast. I agree to the point that you will get there sooner with a muzzle brake in most cases, especially without hearing protection (DON'T DO IT !!!).
 
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I remember when I heard the first muzzle braked rifle go off. I was walking towards the gun range, I thought someone was using a howitzer nearly jumped out of my shoes! lol

I can certainly understand why anyone would want to put a break on their rifles especially if they do lots of shooting at the range. Being the type of person that checks to see if my rifle is on target by only shooting a few rounds pre-season and then straight to the field I have never felt is necessary.

I have been hunting with a 30-06 most of my life. When I am taking a shot on game I am concentrating so much on the shot I never feel the recoil. Same goes for my 300 WM.
 
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One day a range friend arrived and shot at the far end of the range. Maybe 100 feet away. I was at the other end. A new guy arrived and set up between us. It was the loudest gun I have ever heard. I went to the range friend and asked if the my braked rifle was as loud as the new guy's. He said. "No way!" I asked the new guy what caliber he was firing. It was an unbraked 7 Rem Mag.

Guns are loud! Wear protection.
 
johnlittletree said:
Ya well do you think would have made it home alive from Vietnam had you worn hearing protection on patrols? Doubt it. You can not wear hearing protection all the time life just does not work that way. If you never did anything around machinery, guns, loud noises you still lose hearing as you age.

Why do you think the Army made hearing protection part of the uniform? Because they got tired of paying disability claims for hearing loss that is why!

Why do you think a lot of states have laws on the books that prevent people from wearing headphones when driving, operating heavy machinery, riding a bike or running? Because you can not hear things coming up on you from traffic to emergency sounds like sirens on a police car or fire truck or ambulance.

No one is going to go hunting 2-3 times a year for Bambi an elk and some caribou or bear and lose their hearing from that even if they did that for 40+ years. It is not just intensity of the sound but the duration and freq of exposure.

You can take an antibiotic and have it dimish your hearing. You can take glucocorticosteroids and lose your hearing. You can have an idiot on a motorcycle with drag pipes go by and have your hearing ringing for 3 days. Life has some risk associated with everything from sex to using butter and gravy on your food.

On the range or target shooting and plinking sure but out hunting not just no but heck no. You will not catch me hunting with anyone wearing hearing protection that is too much of a safety issue. You might as well blindfold them and then stand down range and let them spin ut the average personhbaround and take pot shots at you. If they are that neurotic about it while out hunting maybe they need to buy their meat at a store. It would be like trying to fly fish with hockey gloves on or operating a 1911 with hockey gloves on to make sure you do not get slide bite.

I was not going to mention this but human hearing is not at all linear and is very logarithmic like the Richter Scale. In fact DB are not at all linear either. On top of that the hear and the brain does not process sound in anything remotely logical or accurate. Volume, pitch, and timbre are intertwined a high pitch sound at 108db will sound much louder to a human than a low freq. at that same 108db. If you take the exact same note and vary the volume it will appear to the listener as if the freq. is changing when in reality only the volume has changed. We have large notches in our hearing were some freq. have a HUGE bump in our ability to perceive them.

Musicians and loudspeaker designers get this but few other's do. We hear more with our brain than we do with the ear itself.

Another thing most people do not know is that your peripheral eyesight is a function of the brain not the eye where a disease is not involved. The decline that most see in this with age can be restored with very specific brain training tool. It is not theory it has been repeatedly demonstrated. 99% of people have no clue.

In the case of sound redirecting, sound or interference of any kind can and does have a huge effect. Splitting up part of the sound spectrum and redirecting parts of the full spectrum back at the shooter and bystanders will alter the freq's people hear and how they perceive the sound itself. Just like the duration changes what we think we hear as well. Similar things are seen in recoil the duration of the power pulse and how quickly it builds to peak force have a greater impact on perception than the actual amount of peak force generated.

Life is never as simple as people want to make it. If something seems simple than it is usually a lie, half-truth or just completely wrong on every level! Sadly people like simple even if it is 100% wrong if they have something to parrot back when someone asks they are normally happy as a lark. That is why ignorance is bliss and really 70% of the population do not want the truth or want any understanding lies and ignorance works better for them! If you dig any deeper than superficially in psychology, sociology, group dynamic, advertising all of this is very clear and it is used on the population daily. Most people think they understand their senses but really most are clueless.
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Well, you do what you want and I'll gladly wear hearing protection. Since I've started my hearing hasn't diminished any further. It works for me. Not sure how a hearing device that allows you to hear at normal ranges but protects you above a certain dB level is "dangerous" in the field. Especially being that you shoot at what you see and not what you hear. Maybe you do things differently.
 
brinky said:
Not sure how a hearing device that allows you to hear at normal ranges but protects you above a certain dB level is "dangerous" in the field. Especially being that you shoot at what you see and not what you hear. Maybe you do things differently.
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My uncle hunted with a guy like that. Once. The guy was a great sound shooter and hit my uncle in the arm. The guy claimed he "heard something."
 
Being long in the tooth and having started shooting at very young age, before anyone realized or recognized the amount of hearing loss at the first unprotected shot, I have tinnitus and a loss of hearing. I have never been recoil sensitive and never thought I would use a brake. I was well aware of the problem when I purchased a custom 338 Edge with a proprietary brake. The brake works like a million bucks and I am unable to hear the difference between this rifle and others that are not so equipped. People to the side of me take the brunt of the noise. I liked the brake on my 338 so well that I had my 300 RUM equipped with the same brake. When I had the same smith build my heavy barreled 22-250 guess what? Yes I did. I put the brake on the rifle. Now I can honestly say that I can see every impact within the limitations of my eyes. Absolutely NO recoil.
I have to agree with some of the other people posting. Hearing loss due to firing weapons was a fact of life for shooters long before the presence of muzzle brakes.
 
WildRose said:
I didn't realize there was a contest.

I am just pointing out the reality that with the larger bores felt recoil is considerably different than with something like a .300 Rum or smaller.

The smaller magnums seem to have a much sharper/quicker recoil whereas the larger bores more of a slow and steady push. At least that's what I've learned shooting everything from the .264 up through .458's.
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+1
The explanation is simple. A medium bore (7mm to 30 cal) has a lot of powder for the bullet weight. Some have a 75/25 ratio of powder to bullet weight. the faster bullet produces the total recoil over less time. the big bores have a much more even powder to bullet weight ratio some times 50/50. The bullet produces inertial recoil that cant be altered except by adding or subtracting weight. and the recoil produced by the powder is the only thing that a brake can work with.

The speed that the weapon recoils is called recoil velocity. medium bore rifles typically have high recoil velocities because of the rifles weight and the amount of powder used. Big bore rifles normally done weigh more, and the recoil velocity is slower (More of a push as described) the faster the rifles recoil velocity, the more "Felt" recoil.
so it is not uncommon for big bore rifles to be more pleasant even though they have more total recoil than a small to medium bore rifle.

The time it takes to deliver the total recoil is the felt results.
Recoil velocity is one of the main culprits that cause retinal detachments in shooting sports.

Most of the rifles that I feel needs brakes, are the big 30 cal and the 338s. I don't have a brake on my 416 even though it has almost 80 ft/lbs of recoil. One of the worst felt recoil rifles I have is the 30/378 in a 7.5 lb rifle.

J E CUSTOM
 
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