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Should We Print Guns? Cody R. Wilson Says "Yes" (Video)
The Wiki Weapon Project and its idea of making guns with 3D printers has already been mentioned on Slashdot. It has also been written up on Forbes.com and a lot of other geek and non-geek sites. Note that when some Wiki Weapon proponents talk about making "guns" with 3D printers, they may be talking only about lower receivers or other static parts, not barrels, firing pins or other parts that must be machined to close tolerances and are subjected to a lot of stress when the gun fires. But low-cost 3D printing and low-cost CNC machining technologies are both advancing at a rapid rate, so thinking about the intersection of firearm manufacturing and open source is both worthwhile and timely. There's been a strong debate about this topic on Eric S. Raymond's Armed and Dangerous blog that's worth reading. Also recommended: The Home Gunsmith.com and CNC Gunsmithing. Astute Slashdot readers will, no doubt, recommend many more. Meanwhile, this video is about licensing, distribution, and legal matters, not the actual manufacture of firearms. There's a transcript (we're finally doing transcripts of selected videos) below the video for those who prefer to read instead of watch.
Then only outlaws will have printed guns.
That's an interesting use of "field day" :)
It does raise lots of questions about the current registration / tracking regime, though. For people who want to home-build a (legal, personal) gun, the BATFE has provisions for applying for a serial number to then inscribe/afix to the result. The details are eluding my memory right now, though, perhaps someone with more recent steeping will be able to expand ...
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Transcripts!
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
...regulating this behavior. The rules of what you can create and can't are pleasantly explicit in the US. There may be a few new edge cases, but on the whole this won't be anything new to the ATF. Simply, with modern tools, zip guns are no longer hard to make.
Where these people will run into trouble is the attitude ~5:30 minutes into the video, the statement "Fuck your laws." Does not show the kind of safe-and-sane experimenter spirit to which the courts are often forgiving. It's more of a "make an example of me" invitation.
I hope everyone inspired to experiment with these toys takes the opposite approach. Last I read about them, the jail sentences that come with full-auto weapons manufacture were 10 years per gun.
The ATF has no problem with good amateur gunsmithing, nor experimenting with new technologies to make better guns. Kel-Tec is a great example. My first Kel-Tec (the Grendel) was painful to shoot, but cheap and reliable, and now they are a thriving business.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kel-Tec
Eventually you'll be able to print the whole thing, and synthesize the charge/primer too. The same equipment will be able to make food and medicine. Who do you want controlling that?
The Chinese were so ignorant they thought gunpowder was useful for making delightful colors in the sky to amuse people.
You call that ignorant. I call that bliss. They used the technology for centuries to delight and entertain people...and nothing more. Call my cynical, but I wish more technologies followed that pattern.
Police are going to have a field day with printed guns, which by nature won't have/need serial numbers or registration (except possibly for conceal and carry)
*re-reads the Second Amendment*
Hmm, don't see the clause where it requires all my firearms to be registered with the government...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
No tracking system is going to deal with the question of home made / under the counter gun sales or construction.
It has ALWAYS been possible (and fairly easy) to make a lower receiver in the comfort and privacy of your own machine shop. Making it on a 3D printer doesn't change a thing except for requiring a different skill set.
In fact, if you wanted to create a race-to-the-finish between aficionados of 3D gun printing and the old boring machine shop way, I'm going to bet that the folks with the 3 axis Bridgeports are going to win hands down. You can teach anyone with an IQ of about 110 to use a milling machine / lathe well enough to make a simple gun in about a month. High school shops do it all the time.
By the time that the 3D folks have figured out the plans, figured out the materials and debugged the system to make a .22 popgun that won't literally melt after the third round, I'm well on my way to fabricating a raft of AK-47 clones.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
3D printing technology is moving into realms that many of us would have overlooked. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8MaVaqNr3U documents using a "sand printer" to make very precise molds for sand casting. Precision castings reduce the amount of finish work required on the casting. Many of the parts used in a gun could be cast using such a technique, finished, tempered where necessary. (Ruger casts a lot of frames, At one time Springfield used cast bolts in the M1A until enough of them broke that they started forging bolts.) MIM is already widely used in the firearms industry for parts like hammers, triggers and grip safeties. The only parts I can think of that couldn't be made using 3D printing or the above technology are springs which can be bought in bulk, and the barrel, which has to be ordinance grade steel and rifled unless you're shooting a smoothbore with shot or a fin stabilized projectile.
On the contrary, they started making weapons out of it in fairly short order.
This, on the other hand, is true. Guns and cannon were not an obvious application. The Chinese used it for flamethrowers, rockets and bombs. The first guns *were* produced by Chinese, about three or four centuries after gunpowder was invented.
As best I can tell, the enthusiasm over 'zOMG 3d printing!!!' is a combination of (optimistic) speculation about what they'll be capable of in the future, genuine enthusiasm for certain quite handy functions right now, and the fact that a lot of the people buzzing about them(especially, though not exclusively, the people who write about the subject but aren't too deeply immersed in it) really have no idea what sorts of fabrication techniques are on the table...
In a way, I suppose it really shouldn't be too surprising. With the dramatic gutting(not total extermination; but the relative decline has been massive) of the skilled-blue-collar/manufacturing sector, there are a lot fewer people out there who have a parent, friend, etc. who is a machinist or works with machinists. Anybody who doesn't go full-vocational-track-at-regional-school-for-that-purpose probably won't encounter much shop class in high school, either.
I don't wish to suggest that 3d printing isn't a genuinely interesting and novel class of techniques: the serious kit can achieve some geometry that you'd be hard pressed to get in other ways, or put out parts that are very similar to injection moulded; but in quantity one and less than a day; but part of its perceived novelty really seems to have to do with the fact that hobbyist 3d printing exists largely outside an environment where knowledge of machine tools really doesn't exist in a serious way.
The thing about being social skills is that they're extraordinarily easy to learn. Go work in a coffee shop for a year and boom, you have all the skills you'll ever need. On the other hand, all that hackneyed, uninspiring haiku stuff that goes hand in hand with programming, tinkering, writing music and so on is actually much harder to learn. And will make you a bunch of money.
So while you're off fucking chicks in high school / college and enjoying the 5 or so years of your life where you mean a damn, the geeks are busy toiling away in their caves creating something cool. At about the post University level they emerge, get gym memberships, get jobs that require social contact and end up with the *really* good looking girls who were also socially awkward in school that would never have banged you in a million years.
So while you're rotting at the local pub, do spare a thought for those sex starved voyeuristic creeps, and their nice cars, big houses and sexy, intelligent wives.
"figured out the materials and debugged the system to make a .22 popgun that won't literally melt after the third round,"
There are tons of people who would melt the weapon anyway after the second shot, so it doesn't matter.
40 years ago, a friend of mine built a .22 gun made completely out of nylon, barrel included. I saw him shoot several dozen rounds without any problem. Fairly accurate up to 5 yards, enough for a hit.
But anyway, the first thing they will print will be silencers for their old guns, no doubt.
Last I looked into it, everyone suggested you do anyway. Right now law enforcement looks at a firearm without a serial and assumes it has been removed, which is a felony. It's probably best to avoid that altogether. ;)
My issue with the organizations like the NRA is that they tend to promote the toys, but not the well regulated malitia that would stand between the populous and foreign or domestic raiding force. Where is the support of rocketry clubs that could actually provide a real defense against helicopters that would place boots on the ground? Clustering a few E engines in a simple shell could deliver enough reactant to be seriously annoying. But all they talk about is how a few pop guns are going to fend off the tanks and hummers.
Anything more than this gets you a one-way ticket to a federal prison as a domestic terrorist. The US Government and national media successfully turned the notion of a militia into a slur during the Clinton years. Just saying you belonged to a militia meant you were at least a right-wing kook and more likely a dangerous terrorist.
In fairness a lack of manual skills (and/or confidence in them) is hardly a trivial problem to overcome - mastery of physical skills is no less demanding than intellectual skills even if the pool of "potential masters" is arguably considerably larger. For a programmer, engineer, etc. to acquire the skills to make a reasonably precise component would hundreds or thousands of hours of experience. What's the general estimate? 10,000 hours to achieve mastery of a subject? That's ~5 years @40 hours per week, time which could alternately be spent extending their expertise into areas where their existing skills translate - a much better proposition in a culture where specialization is the norm, unless you draw pleasure from the act of creating the components of course, but that's an orthogonal question.
That leaves hiring a machinist or time on a CNC machine - both of which are typically expensive and incur significant delays, especially if you're not lucky enough to know someone personally who's willing to squeeze you in during slack time. And either route will probably require you to provide plans about as accurate as needed for 3D printing anyway (often more so in the case of milling machines). Given that I'd say there's actually a pretty considerable market niche for 3D printing for the foreseeable future among hobbyist tinkerers, and it will only grow as the quality and speed improves. Personally I know plenty of people that don't consider themselves to have artistic or hands-on skills, but probably wouldn't hesitate to download and add personal touches to lots of things like custom clothes hooks, door-knobs, costume jewlery, etc. if their $50 3D printer could quickly turn it into a quality solid object. Now that probably won't be a reality n the next 5-10 years, but it's nice to see it in the pipeline considering the average Joe no longer has ready access to the machinists and other custom craftsmen that were once common a part of the cultural landscape.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.