Call Of The Wild: Behind the Scenes at Jaguar Silencers

It was CANCON Arizona 2025 when Jaguar Silencers first caught our eye. In a world of silencers that look like a waterpipes hanging off pistols, here was one that, well, looked almost like a big vape or something.

Silencers are typically shaped like tubes, because the bodies have traditionally been constructed from them. Manufacturers buy tubing or hollow round bar stock themselves, then the internal baffles that slow gases to quiet the gunshots are cut on a lathe and stuffed inside. Even when this process is done on an industrial scale by robots and everything is sealed together with lasers, it’s firmly 20th century technology.

When some silencer manufacturers first began using 3D printing for manufacturing years ago, they essentially started by producing older legacy designs with these new machines. This isn’t necessarily bad per se — a good design is a good design, but it isn’t exactly taking advantage of all you can do with 3D printing, either. Like making a space-age horse buggy.

*Owner-engineers Jake (left) and Ben (right) Staub in front of their favorite machine.*

That kinda-vape-shape can that caught the eye was Jaguar’s CAX9T, a titanium 9mm model from Jaguar’s X line. All of these models have an asymmetric silhouette, which allow for more internal volume in a shorter package (they call it an “eXpanded chamber system”). As a bonus, with a pistol it means you don’t need to use tall iron sights to see over it, if you’re still out there without a dot.

There were other silencers too, of different calibers and sizes, some more traditional shapes but with different textures and patterns cooked into the surface. Stars and stripes on the outside. The rosette spots of a jaguar. A big bore for hunting calibers, complete with a buck on the side. They can get away with this because all the suppressors Jaguar Silencers makes are 3D printed, and they’ve never done it any other way. They even have a model named the Sick Nasty (“SN” for short) that features a built-in cage for heat dissipation that’s printed right in place.

*Full series of silencers that came to term within its powdered metal womb.*

We knew we’d have to get a closer look at how it was all done.

*There's a Bridgeport mill hiding somewhere in every American machine shop.*

OHIO BORN

Jaguar Silencers is a new name in the world of suppressors, but they’re not new to the industry, having performed OEM work, and they’re definitely not new to novel methods of manufacturing. Ben Staub founded one of the first 3D-printing facilities in the state of Ohio, BasTech, back in 1994. (Back then the technology was more commonly called “stereolitho-graphy printing” — quite the mouthful). The idea then, as today, was to produce custom, high-end, low-volume parts. BasTech still exists, doing the same.

More recently, Ben started Jaguar Silencers with his son, Jake Staub, who is an engineer in his own right, and they share a production facility. “Think of it as ‘Powered by BasTech’” Ben tells us.

*Jaguar stays active on social, showing some of the cool stuff they do like the SN cages.*

Dayton, Ohio, is teeming with advanced aerospace engineering facilities, and it’s been that way since Orville and Wilbur Wright built their first flying machine factory. It’s like a ring that radiates around Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. And not far away is where you’ll find Jaguar Silencers.

Production is housed inside a nondescript stone building right off the highway. One of thousands just in this city, but the looks of this 32,000-square-foot facility are deceiving. Upon entry, you’re greeted by a wall of glass. Behind is a room where lines of slick machines that look closer to ovens, appliances, or servers sit in lines.

The quiet whir of cooling fans hum in the background rather than the squeal of cutting metal. Things are made here, but not all made in the old way.

*There's just something sweet about silencers unfinished in the white — they make neat patterns when exposed to heat.*

In the front conference room, which features both a model of a Predator drone and an original Wright flyer, we were shown cutaways of a Jaguar silencer we can’t yet show in print, but needless to say it wasn’t full of standard baffles. “The benefit of additive manufacturing is that complexity is free,” Ben explains, “you can try a lot of things.” Like the heat sink of the Sick Nasty, that was Jake’s idea — no one had done it that way before, and it worked.

MAKING METAL

All the Jaguar suppressors are made here, soup to nuts. They are designed, printed, cut, tempered, machined, finished, coated, and packaged all in-house. They come in as fine powder and leave as silencers.

*The production facility used to be a commercial kitchen. Things still get baked and assembled here, but you wouldn't want to eat them.*

Ben and Jake gave us a tour of the place, answering all our questions along the way. Even though Jaguar isn’t the only thing happening in this building, much of the bulk manufacturing itself surrounded silencers. You can tell it’s a place run by engineers; common spaces arranged for purely utilitarian purposes — charming in its plainness, with many walls beige and bereft of adornment.

Those appliances behind the glass you could see from the front room? Large commercial printers, plus more you can’t see from the window along with some smaller units to boot. Laser engraving and tolerance checking also happens here. The walls are a glossy tile, and there are long butcher-block tables. Before this building was purchased in 2006, it was used as a commercial kitchen, and this room was for assembling sandwiches. Things still get baked and assembled here, but you don’t eat them.

These printers aren’t for functional silencers; for those we need the direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) machines, and they’re in the next room. This is really where everything gets cooked. The silencers are made in groups on a plate in layers that are measured in microns, the lasers melting the fine powdered metal into weld. These are the machines that Jake and Ben like the most, you can tell. But really, what’s not to love about a machine that turns a picture you made on a computer screen directly into a tough metal part?

*There was some art, like these framed photos of injection molds and polymer parts.*

Once the DMLS is done, it’s the bulk of the work by time but it’s also just step one — there are more rooms to go through. As we move into the main machining area, it starts looking more like the kind of facility we’re used to. It smells like cutting oil and metal. There are Haas CNC machines, wire EDM cutters, and a great deal of specialized machines we couldn’t readily identify.

*Jaguar has commercial printers lined up and humming along like servers in several spaces in their facility.*

With each step back into this area, the machines get a little less sophisticated but gain a little more soul. Jaguar Silencers uses CAD and has piles of printers and has lasers, but they also have an old manual Bridgeport milling machine in the back. Like a Predator drone next to a Wright flyer.

*The DMLS builds the silencers up layer by layer.*

LOOSE ROUNDS

This isn’t a place where you’d go to make 10,000 or 100,000 of the exact same thing, having a nimble operation is a business principle here. Modern technology allows a great deal of easy experimentation that would have been totally impossible just a short time ago. This is part of the reason Jaguar Silencers already has so many suppressor lines despite being a newcomer — they’re not afraid to keep trying new things, and they keep trying new things inside and out.

*The equipment got a little less sophisticated and a little more soulful as we moved through. Lasers gave way to CNC and wire EDM to finally a line of well-maintained manual machines in the back.*

Most silencer companies are started by people who got into guns first and silencers second. At Jaguar Silencers, it’s the opposite, or maybe sideways. They own guns and shoot, of course, and also hunt. But when it comes down to it, they’re more interested in the silencer side of the equation, finding the technical nuances especially appealing.

This not only gives them a different perspective, but it also makes complete sense for a company started by two generations of engineers born and raised right off Wright-Pat.

We look forward to putting rounds through whatever they come up with next.

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