After purchasing silencers on Form 4's and not having them meet expectations, my brother Chris Quilligan (also an ear, nose and throat physician) and I decided to become class II in 1998 and Quicksilver Manufacturing came to pass, located in Northern Alabama.  Our first 9 mm silencer took a year to design and was made of steel and aluminum.  It actually worked very well in comparison with other silencers we'd purchased.  We were hooked.  When we weren't in clinic or surgery, we were in the shop or on the shooting range.

I was disabled from practicing medicine in late 1999 and Quilligan ENT was closed.  When not in bed with severe pain from degenerative disc disease, I was in the shop working on my hobby and wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my life.  I relocated to Idaho, Chris went back to Southern California  to practice medicine and Quicksilver Manufacturing went from being a partnership to sole proprietor.   In 2001, one of my customers told a local sporting goods store owner about QSM silencers.  This man happened to run a local CNC shop, so naturally a working relationship developed.  

In 2002, after seeing a pen gun in the movie, "US Marshals", I decided to manufacture one myself and then suppress it.  Encouraged by my ever-supportive CNC shop staff, Quicksilver pen guns were developed with a run of 100, a handful with matching silencers.  Al Poulson did an excellent article about the pen guns, which have now become collectors items.  Later that year, I decided to develop my first titanium .223 silencer and mapped out the design in detail.  Unfortunately, I was working late one evening and made a mistake on the blast baffle design.  Since I was tired, I decided to test it anyway.  That 'mistake' turned into a silencer design that's held its own against major manufacturers' cans for the past five years.  Al Poulson did another great article on this .223 can.  The same baffle design is now manufactured in .308, .300, .338, MP5-40, .408 and very soon 50 caliber BMG.  There are no first, second and third generation Quicksilver titanium silencers.  If the baffle design works, why go back to the drawing board and change it?

In mid 2006, with the prodding of some friends, Quicksilver Manufacturing went from being a part time hobby to a full time business in LLC mode.  Vince Baertschi came into our lives, first as a customer, next as a dear friend and enthusiastic salesman/businessman and we were on our way.   In the following months, Mad Bull Airsoft surprised us with an offer to replicate our .223 silencer for international airsoft sales.  We were invited by the Army to send a .223 silencer for testing against two other major manufacturers' models and the feeling we had as a family was "why us?"  We were invited to do prototype magnum silencers for CheyTac LLC, which turned out to be quieter and more accurate than we were hoping for.  (Anxiety is wondering if that 'first round pop' on a CheyTac .408 is going to be the sound of your prototype silencer flying 50 yards and burying itself into the gravel bank...)  CheyTac had warned us that they'd tried five different steel silencers from various manufacturers and all had failed by 150 rounds.  We knew this rifle was going to be a tough one to suppress. 

We've had to make a lot of decisions in the past year as a family.  One of them was whether or not to name our silencers.  To our way of thinking, we weren't really aiming towards the kind of shooter than needed a macho name on his (her) silencer.  Quicksilver silencers were already being purchased by shooters who were famous in their own right.  Every time SAR came in with another photo of some woman in fish net stockings blowing on a silencer my wife went into apoplexy, so we pretty much decided as a family that advertising wasn't for us.   Seriously, we'd rather spend the money on new machine guns than advertising when it comes right down to it.  And, can you get much better advertising than the recent Army Task Force Evaluation letter we received? 

When asked if we wanted to self finance and build slowly, as compared to seeking investment capital, our family chose the slow road.  We felt that if we actually had a worthy product, our customers would do the promotion for us.  And in the past year we've certainly seen that happen.  Most of our customers own more than one QSM silencer, new customers are most often referred by their friends and our dealer base continues to grow.  Recently one of our dealers emailed us and remarked, "You're quickly becoming my favorite silencer manufacturer!"  We know this dealer sells other name brand silencers, so that certainly was thrilling for us to hear.

Today we received an email from a new customer who was unfortunately dissatisfied with the performance of another brand name silencer.  He remarked about how thrilled he was to actually get a prompt reply to an email inquiry.  He was upset that his brand name silencer had not lived up to its 'advertised' reputation.  You know, that's what it's all about to us.  We enjoy helping people.  As a family we used to run an extremely busy medical practice and what we enjoyed most was helping our patients.  We were on call 24/7 back then.  We still are.  Our cell number's up on the website (we don't own an answering machine or use an answering service), we're online pretty much constantly and if we're not online we're in the shop or out shooting with friends. 

Quicksilver Manufacturing LLC is family owned and operated and encouraged by friends.  It's sure been an exciting year.  Special thanks to Billy, Randy, Josh, Vince, John, Steve and so many others who've encouraged us this last year to do what we love doing, i.e. 'make your hobby your business'.  As a family, our passion is building superior silencers.