3D printed weapons

I am sure you have all read about the 3D printed weapons that have been tested in the US and Canada in recent months.
But has anyone else tried to print out a gun and maybe even tested it if it works?

Works. But after one shot the liberator usually falls apart, and the accuracy is pretty poor. Honestly you can make a better gun with hardware store stuff, and garage tools.

(I have not tried it myself, but let's say that I know somebody who did)

IMO the best way to use a 3D printer to make weapons is to dismantle it and use its components.

For instance you can combine a threaded rod or an aluminium profile with an heavy stepper motor and bam !


Jokes aside, oh please not that topic again...

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Most of my technical comments should be correct, but is THIS one ?
Anyway, as a rule of thumb, always double check what people write.

Has there been a topic on this already - sorry, I couldn;t find it

But my question was more if people have print-tested such 3D designs

as much as i hate this topic,

i know the police in australia did a a liberator and nearly injured somone in the process, most of their fears aren't so much for the person who might get shot but for the person who stands a high degree of risk of blowing his or her hand off,


at end of the day commonsense to a degree should prevail in even the the silliest of people, 3d printing a gun or a knife is akin to building a car out of cheese, it's just not going to work safely no matter how it's engineered,

to answer the original question, "But has anyone else tried to print out a gun and maybe even tested it if it works?"
i have gotten as far as viewing a few models and printing a few structural pieces for the sake education on the topic,
to be honest we build stronger parts for our 3d printers , i'd even go as far as to accuse them of video fakery if not actually capturing a miracle on video,

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i do agree, not this topic again.

though i would like it to go away, it is a reality that people are going to make guns with there 3d printers,


i just dont like the negitive attention that this gets from the press for this hobby that i love so much.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/10/2013 12:42AM by dissidence.

the australian police tried to make it sound as dangerous as possible, one liberator has made it to 9 shots, a canadian rifle made it to 14, It's an awesome feat for plastic but people are overreacting about it.

What do you guys think of this technology of making 3D printed weapons in general?

3D printed weapons are B.lls..t .

In Germany all weapon manufactured is to be tested for liability and solidity with P++ load. Printed guns would endanger even the testing person.
The quality of your "layer on layer" barrel is dependent on so many factors that ... e.g. your aircondition of the room your printing in can be the factor between "gas disrupts the layers" - and "everything sticks together well " as the printed solid is no "solid" and is not homogenious ..

If one wants to go for a single shot pistol , I would recommend a black powder muzzle loader pistol - The difference to the printed ones is, that it looks good and it keeps mostly what it promises!

Only thing I could imagine is a kind of hybrid: steel barrel as rail and block and the more complex geometry / molded parts like the grip to be printed!

For the Germans here around I just want to add, that barrel as block are weapon relevant parts and manufaturing them without a license is forbidden by law here!

I actualy designed and RepRap printed one.

though it's not realy considered to be a weapon by the law.



HUKACZ

but there is another funny thing, law actually fails to describe some kind of weapons precisely. In Poland you have to have a permit for a Brass_knuckles. But where this weapon begins and large keyring begins no one knows. It'a actually no problem to print it.

I actually am in contact with local Police to clear some things up ahead. I want to print a rubber ball version, like this one:
Shotgum

Want to see a nice weapon that I am sure can be condensed and the govt couldn't trace the projectile (almost a bullet)? Screw 3d printed guns try a Solar Flash Steam Cannon instead.

I bet that could be modified to be a lethal weapon without the sun. So, governments of the world eff off you can't control the people no matter how hard you try because someone will make a device that will kill and your fear of the masses turning it against you is founded but only because you keep pushing the people to the brink of revolution.

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I await Skynet and my last vision will be of a RepRap self replicating the robots that is destroying the human race.

One thing that cannot be denied is that Cody Wilson put 3D printing in every person's radar.

I think anyone dumb enough to fire one of these things printed at home will have a great chance of ending up on the darwin awards list top ten.

valerenga Wrote:
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> But my question was more if people have
> print-tested such 3D designs

Yes, a friend and I successfully tested the Liberator design printed on his Lulzbot: [www.youtube.com]

Most of the failures of the design have been due to using incorrect ammunition (9mm in the Finnish test done by a media outlet, which is much too high pressure) or incorrect material (one of the Australian police tests used PLA, which is really unwise - talk about glass-like shrapnel).



valerenga Wrote:
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> What do you guys think of this technology of
> making 3D printed weapons in general?

It's a slow, expensive method to make an inferior product. It's highly impractical - the interest is in seeing just how far the technology can be pushed, and how design has to be re-thought to accomodate the material and process limitations.

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[haveblue.org]

I would see the question, if Cody Wilson would also take the responsibility (at least for himself) regarding accidents and the missuse wich is directly connected to handing out such ideas to an environment which is not able to handle them correctly!

The whole subject of 3d printed weapons is rather silly. Putting explosives in a plastic gun must involve a high degree of stupidity.

I'm very interested in 3D printed weapons, but only as an intellectual and legal exercise.

Just because someone else put plans on the internet doesn't make them liable for your actions. That goes for hotends or printed products. The only way to sue Cody Wilson for your injuries and actually get a judgement with any meaning towards him would be to do so in a Texas court (where he resides). As a resident of that state I know that you would have an awfully hard time convincing a civil court that Cody was the one who injured you (and just about impossible to convince a criminal court), when you made the weapon and then you decided to fire it without some sort of remote testing process.

That said, the Liberator is sort of cool, but a bit silly. I think a person would have to be really desperate to fire that in self defense or otherwise, which is probably the way it should be. It's short ranged and dangerous, you would be better off building a muzzle loading smoothbore out of pipe, or using a knife, or like someone said: take apart your printer and build a club.

As a U.S. citizen, the only Defense Distributed design of interest to me is the AR-15 lower receiver (and maybe the magazines). In the United States the lower receiver is the bit of the AR-15 that is legally classified as the weapon (which is lawful to manufacture yourself for personal use according to the ATF, due to them only having authority in matters involving interstate commerce). In the AR-15, this piece doesn't contain the explosion, that's up to the upper portion of the gun. The lower piece basically just holds the weapon together. The most common failure of the lower is at the back around the recoil tube due to the shock from the recoil of firing, but Cody has gotten some prints to hold together up to 600 rounds as far as I know.

Of course, this is all fairly useless outside the United States. If guns are verboten in your country, the upper, trigger and all the accessories are going to be just as hard (or harder) to acquire as a lower, and at that point you could probably just acquire a full rifle from some illegal source. Probably the Liberator is of more interest to folks outside the U.S. If guns are plentiful in your non-US, country which is full of unrest, AK-47s and M-16s are probably already everywhere from unlicensed manufacturers and cold war proliferation.

In the U.S. it is fairly useless information for U.S. criminals because it only knocks about 100$ off the price of a 1000$ weapon. And it's way easier for a criminal to acquire a complete stolen rifle off the street illegally than it is for them to legally 3D print a lower, acquire all the parts online to complete the upper, trigger assembly, other stuff and build a rifle from scratch. As far as identifying rounds, all the unique markings to the weapon will be placed on the ammunition by the upper.

So yeah, the only thing interesting that Cody has done (to me personally as a law-abiding citizen) is make it easier to build a regulated part, legally by yourself, on a 3d printer instead of milling it out of aluminum with a more expensive machine. But like I said, it's a 99$ part, which I can acquire with very little hassle from a licensed dealer (filling out a form and the dealer calls the state for clearance) at about 5 or 6 locations within a mile of me. However, Mr. Wilson's main goal in this, for anyone who has read the articles and watched the documentaries, is to gain attention for himself. He has done that and for better or worse he has also cast attention on the 3d printing community as people who can create more than just baubles.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/12/2013 10:00PM by Snarky.