Almost Here: Downloading Gun Design and Manufacturing At Home With 3D Printer
via 3d printed gun: Wiki Weapon on hold after Stratasys revokes lease on printer.
The promise of home 3-D printing is that you can construct anything you want from the comfort and convenience of your own living room. For a group whose mission is to 3-D print a working pistol from scratch, however, that promise has been revoked.
Defense Distributed, a collective led by UT-Austin law student Cody Wilson, has raised $20,000 online in a bid to design and develop the world’s first entirely 3-D printed gun, which it calls the Wiki Weapon. If it succeeds, not only will it build its own prototype, it will share the design publicly, so that anyone around the world with a 3-D printer can print his own pistol. It’s sort of the opposite of “Don’t try this at home.”
In a promotional video, Wilson waxes philosophical about the project. “The Defense Distributed goal isn’t really personal armament,” he says. “It’s more the liberation of information. It’s about living in a world where you can just download the file for the thing you want to make in this life. As the printing press revolutionized literacy, 3-D printing is in its moment.”
Turns out the company that leased Defense Distributed its 3-D printer doesn’t see it that way. In a letter to Wilson dated Sept. 26, the legal counsel for Stratasys Inc. informed Wilson that it was cancelling his lease of the company’s uPrint SE printer. “It is the policy of Stratasys not to knowingly allow its printers to be used for illegal purposes,” the company wrote, noting that Wilson lacked a federal license for manufacturing firearms.
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More Futurism at PJ Lifestyle:
Ahem….it is NOT illegal to manufacture a firearm as long as it is for your own personal use, is not intended for resale, and does not otherwise conflict with federal gun laws (i.e., no silencers, fully automatic machine guns, etc.).
My understanding is you don’t even need a serial number on it.
Perhaps Cody Wilson should bring a lawsuit against Stratasys Inc. for breach of contract?
Maybe Cody shouldn’t have based his project to democratize weapons production around somebody else’s property.
Not that I have high hopes for the project anyway. Current 3D printers aren’t great at making things that are strong, tough, and smooth; all traits necessary to make anything resembling a modern firearm.
Not really. Some very effective “modern firearms” were anything but “strong, tough, and smooth”.
The World War Two British Sten Gun, a 9mm submachine gun, was a case in point. Its receiver was a piece of steel tubing, its bolt was little more than a machined chunk of pressed-steel bar, and its barrel was basically thick-wall tubing bored and rifled to .355″. The running joke in Britain was that its big recoil spring came from a leftover car shock absorber, only because a bedspring wouldn’t fit in the tube. Yet it worked well enough firing at 650 rounds per minute to be at least the equal of the German SMGs, like the Erma MP38/40, that cost a lot more to make.
Copies of the Sten were made in underground workshops in occupied Denmark; postwar the same thing was done in Israel in the early days after independence. More recently, Stens showed up with the Zapatistas in southern Mexico; those were apparently “homemade” as well. And the Zapatistas were mainly poor farmers whose most “sophisticated” workshop was probably a local car mechanic’s. Exactly none of the above failed to go “bang” when the trigger was pressed.
As for more recent designs,the Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol wasn’t even as “sophisticated” as the Sten Gun. Its receiver was stamped from sheet steel, folded into a box shape, and tack-welded at the edges. And its bolt was made the same way, a box of sheet steel folded like those little boxes your checks come from the bank in, except this little box was simply poured full of melted lead (yes, just like moulding bullets) and let cool. The result was a bolt and receiver heavy and strong enough to withstand firing 9mm or .45 rounds at 1,100 rounds per minute.
I’ve seen “homemade” MACs that worked about as well as the factory item. Just about anybody who can (a) cut metal and (b) follow instructions can make one. There even used to be mail-order kits for the darned things; to get around federal laws, they came “without” receivers or bolts, but with a sheet of paper like a dress pattern with the specified thickness and grade of steel needed, plus a pattern for the assemblies, printed on it. Assuming you could cut steel, even with a hacksaw, and fold it, even with a bench vise, making them was about as complicated as putting together one of those “banker’s boxes” you put file folders in.
Here are a couple of examples of small arms even more readily adaptable to improvised manufacture, Wiki or otherwise;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FP-45_Liberator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deer_gun
Keep in mind that the purpose of these two was to kill an enemy soldier, so the pistol user could “liberate” his weapon for use against occupation forces.
The Deer Gun seems especially well-suited to 3D printing, IMPO.
Also note that mechanically, a submachine gun that fires only on “full-auto” is much simpler to design and make than a self-loading (i.e. semiautomatic) pistol. The fact that the process described here could fabricate even a relatively “rough” copy of a Glock is telling, as the Glock is one of the more complex designs around today. If you want to see a fairly primitive autopistol, that still works quite efficiently, consider that during WW2, the U.S., Germany, and even semi-neutral Finland all had designs for stamped-steel, locked-breech self-loaders firing their standard military pistol rounds (.45 ACP and 9 x 19mm). Any or all of these “emergency” designs could be readily adapted to 3D printing.
Firearms aren’t nearly as complicated as most people think. I know, because I’ve worked with them for most of my life.
cheers
eon
Excellent response!
While I knew about the Liberator, I’d never heard of the “Deer gun” – ya learn something new every day!
I also had heard that full auto was easier to do than semi-auto, but not being a gunsmith myself and with current law being what it is, I have never been in a position to verify this assertion.
Good to get more informed feedback on that one!
And that Ingram/Mac-10 receiver flat you mentioned….I was oh so tempted at one time to try my hand at one!
Semi-auto only, of course.
I settled for assembling my own semi-auto AR, which interestingly enough someone has already figured out how to make a 3D printed polymer receiver for that works.
http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_3_4/586154_The_formidable_3D_printed_polymer_AR_lower.html&page=1&anc=bottom#bottom
Read it again – they are claiming he was breaking the law as the reason for taking back their 3D printer.
He wasn’t breaking the law.
I can see law enforcement going ballistic (?) over this process if it ever succeeds. Reminds me a bit of “In the Line of Fire,” the movie where Clint Eastwood is a secret service agent and John Malkovich is his nemesis. If I recall correctly, the Malkovich character makes himself some kind of undetectable pistol out of epoxy resin and rubber bands. Not a practical everyday firearm – but it only had to work once.
Speaking of Wiki, you don’t necessarily need to lease an expensive 3D printer. There are open source devices out there, such as RepRap and Eventorbot, with extensive online support communities.
I think the only thing missing is the material. As far as I know, 3D printers make stuff out of plastic. Not sure if there’s a plastic as strong as steel that could be made into 3D printer food. However, the printer could still be used to create the non-metallic parts of a weapon. Given, say, an off-the-shelf 1911 barrel and action, you might be able to print a custom frame that looks like something else – a camera, for example.
There are possibilities. Just not sure what the guy in the article is aiming for.
There already are metal 3D printers.
http://3dprinting.com/materials/metal/3d-printing-metal/
If the technology matures enough, the next step is to make sure the heat treatment and metal alloy composition are correct – if so, the barrel, bolt, and firing pin can be 3D printed in someone’s garage.
Best thing for law enforcement is to get over it.
Having the capability to do something illegal is not the same as breaking the law. A simple lathe can be used to make a firearm – yet I don’t think all lathe owners are being hassled. A sports car can do 120 MPH – yet you don’t get a ticket just for having one.
Same with this technology. As long as the relevant laws are obeyed there is no problem.
Then there is the fact this is new technology now, but in 20 years it will be considered old technology.
What’s to prevent someone in future decades from taking old obsolete 3D printing technology and using it to make something the authorities aren’t comfortable with?
Again, as long as they are not breaking the law I have no issue with them.
Cool! But who needs to print a gun? Maybe someday I’ll be able to print quarters for the soda machine! Or Krugerrands…
Stratasys’ lawyers and marketing specialists obviously got a case of the vapors at a user making a nasty ol’ gun. I emailed the company and received a response saying that the CEO is a “poster child for the second amendment,” and that they could not allow their machine to be used for an illegal purpose. It seems pretty clear that the purpose is NOT illegal, at least according to the BATFE website, and the CEO’s being described like that is, well, like “some of my best friends……” I believe Stratasys will come to regret having reacted this way, as the issue circulates to a wider and wider audience, many of whom are gun owners. They will not be the only ones selling 3d printers!
Hmm…who is Stratasys’ major competitor?