Cudos to the OP for noticing this and being curious enough to ask the question. The reason it's there is that most devices have to be timed and there is no way to know how far down the device will have to be screwed. That means there may be a little bit of gap. But in a perfect word it shouldn't be there, I would hazard a guess that in 99.9% of the designs it wasn't accounted for in the design process,and in most cases it's just going to screw up all the work you did to design the part that comes after it, especially if the device is a flash hider. The taper idea you are talking about would just make things worse especially if you want to reduce flash. I'm not going to comment if you should remove it or not, as I'm not familiar with the device you are using. I will say that I wouldn't personally include that particular design element in a flash hider for a few specific reasons.
Marty916 is very correct in his statement, and of course he should be, he's the SME when it comes to muzzle devices on this board. BCE designs very nice stuff.
But...the little secret of many other manufactures of muzzle brakes and flash hiders is that they really don't understand the science behind the devices they are making. Many of them use their machining smarts, intuition and a lot of trial and error on the rifle to make their devices. There's nothing wrong with that, but it really doesn't afford any real innovation because they don't understand the systems they are dealing with. A lot of the true innovation in this field was done decades ago by people with lots of letters behind their names and usually in the employ of the military or some other large arms manufacturer. This is why you usually see regurgitation of the same designs over and over from different manufacturers.
To do things properly and come up with very effective designs (or truly innovative ones) you need to know (and I mean know it down to the smallest detail) fluid mechanics, gas dynamics, flow theory, heavy calculus etc, etc . You are dealing with physical systems on the verge and some of the science still isn't fully understood.
There are precious few texts that deal with the subject, and very few papers and trade articles. But there is nothing that tells you, if you do Y, X will happen. I researched this topic extensively and came to the realization that unless I wanted to go back to school, gaining a true understanding of this discipline is out of my reach! A friend of mine tried to tell me this a long time ago but i didn't listen, and it took me over a year to learn this sad fact for myself.
Last edited by Clobbersauras; 02-17-12 at 20:46.
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Originally Posted by Marty916
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