3D Printed Suppressor Tools

Niche tools for items like silencers can often be out of stock right when you need them, but 3D printed suppressor tools can fill the gap.

Ever need a tool, only to find out there seems not be any for that specific task? Or the manufacturer is temporarily out? Welcome to the club. When it comes to suppressors, and disassembly of the same, you’re pretty much locked in. If you buy the Whiz-Bang suppressor, then the W-B Co. LLC is likely the only company that makes the tools to take them apart.

Well, almost.

Warren Innovative Technologies makes 3D printed suppressor tools to fit any suppressor. No, really. By my count, 33 different spanners, sockets, splined or cap-fitting tools. These are all made from injection-mold grade ABS, but 3D printed. Where there are pins needed, the pins are held in place during the printing process, so they’re firmly held by the finished product.

I know what some of you are thinking: ABS? How is that going to hold up to my leverage with a breaker bar?” My first thought is: If you need a breaker bar to get your suppressor apart, you’ve done something wrong already. My second thought is: Warren will replace busted tools, so you’ll have some thinking to do while the box wends its way to you.

After all, suppressors are supposed to be hand-tight. Yes, the mounts should be torqued on to a certain level, one that ABS might not withstand, but we already have perfectly good steel wrenches for that. If you want more than hand-tight, Warren makes a wrench handle/spanner to do that.

The ABS Advantage

The two big advantages of the ABS printed tools are that they’re unlikely to mar your suppressor, and they’re readily fabricated. The ABS-M30 won’t leave scars on your aluminum tubes. By being readily fabricated (once all the engineering, R&D, etc. has been done, of course), Warren can make them when you need them. If they were made from forged aluminum, machined to fit, you’d have to wait until the next batch of that suppressor was made. If not a commonly owned one, that wait might be a while. This way, everything is either in-stock or made so quickly it might as well have been.

Oh, and do you have the spring-loaded workroom strips, the ones used to click your other tools into? Well, the Warren tools click into those. For those of you who aren’t one to leave tools behind when tired, there’s also a dedicated hole to put a loop of 550 cord (aka “dummy cord”) on it, so you can keep track of your tools.

Also, once the printing software has been generated for each tool, it was easy as pie for Warren to integrate the suppressor type name into the instructions. So, each one is clearly marked as to what it fits.

Now, if you only own one suppressor, or own several, but all from the same maker, this might not be needed. But what do you do when your .22 rimfire, your .223 and your .308 are each from a different maker? Or, you lose your one-and-only tool, and the suppressor maker is in-between production runs of that tool?

Why, you just track down Warren Innovative Technologies (SuppressorTools.com) and order up what you need.

As an example, the first tool I clicked on proves the point. It’s a socket tool to tighten or loosen an AAC three-prong mount. AAC is gone, and they aren’t around to make a tool for you.

But Warren is.

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in the 2021 Buyer's Guide special issue of Gun Digest the Magazine.

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