3d printed guns - how effective are they

Look at how many home blacksmiths and knifemakers there are. The knife and axe industry thrives just fine.

Effective enough to give Chuck Schumer a seizure.

JeffG said:

Look at how many home blacksmiths and knifemakers there are. The knife and axe industry thrives just fine.

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And many hobbyists and artisans can produce comparable if not better products.

With "metal" 3D printing, components will be better than current components made from MIM process.

How about a single shot shotgun with a piece of pipe for a barrel?Like a Snake Charmer.This has been done before, by resistance fighters in the Philippines during WW 2.The only metal needed would be a chamber insert to hold the shotshell,with a short barrel, a breechface about the size of a quarter and a firing pin.All the rest could be 3D printed .

The Filipino resistance fighters used what they had been using for generations as weapons for hunting and protecting domestic animals from predators: slam-bangs, homemade shotguns at the simplest a pipe barrel holding the shotgun shell sliding in a pipe receiver with a firing pin at the bottom. In India, people salvage steel gas pipe from abbandoned shipwrecks for gun barrels; there's a whole cottage industry making Brown Bess relicas (easily restored to firing). The Indian underground also makes AK22s, submachines based on the Swedish K action, styled to look like AK47s, firing whatever round is commonly available on the commercial market, which is usually .22LR. These are built in garage size workshops. If the builder and user is will to forgo rifling, high pressure gas pipe can be used for barrel material.

The oversized plastic derringer made on a plastic 3D printer doesn't deserve the hoopla.

Deadlier weapons are being illegally made today all over the world with little more than tools like vises, files, drills.

Demi-human said:

I also think that if a wand can find a zipper, it can fine a primer cup, much less a brass case...

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the tsa can defnetly find a brass case. Even an empty one that got inside the liner on a suit case.

AlexanderA said:

One aspect of this that we haven't discussed is that if the 3-D printing technology progresses to the point where all the parts of guns can be made easily at home, it would mean the death of the firearms industry. Or, if it survives, it would be 100% dependent on government contracts. This doesn't sound like a particularly good development.

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The technology to print all the parts for a production quality firearm is a long, loooong way off, if ever possible. Even the very expensive DMLS printers that can produce metallic parts cannot be used for every piece of a firearm, as the metallurgy of the substrate just isn't up to the task. DMLS parts are, at best, comparable to sand castings. Ruger has been investment casting for a long time and has refined that production method greatly, yet they still have to make barrels, cylinders and other high stress parts out of chromoly bar stock and heat treat it.

Top of the line 3D printers can't even produce plastic parts that will compare to high strength injection molded long chain polymers, let along fiber or glass reinforced stuff.

People who see 3D printing replacing industrial manufacturing just don't understand manufacturing. There's soooo much more to it than producing dimensionally accurate parts and assembling them. Completely self-sufficient, vertically integrated manufacturing by the end user is pure science fiction, always will be.

This was the point:

Telekinesis said:

What the combination of 3D printing and this company's files does is take home gun manufacturing from the realm of individuals with specific knowledge about firearms and opens it up to literally everybody with a computer and a 3D printer. That amounts to a massive increase in the number of people with the ability to make weapons.

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The utility of affordable 3D printers is still and will for some time be in the realm of fragile toys and novelties.

The thing that many anti-gun folks get is that threshold of firearm quality/sophistication for good recreational/hunting/competitive/self-defense use is pretty high... but the threshold for criminal/destructive use is very low. A functioning blow-back submachine gun can be made from stuff at home depot. Will it be very accurate? No... it won't even be rifled. Will it have a long life, suitable for passing along to heirs or grinding out tens of thousands of rounds of practicing? No, probably not. But it would be more than sufficient to hold up a convenience store and kill all the witnesses, or to spray the corner of a rival drug dealer, or to inflict terrible casualties on a mass of tightly-grouped people in a closed environment. 3D-printed guns are probably already good enough to do those kinds of bad, nasty, illegal things. But they're a long way from being useful for any of my purposes.

Sharp Dog asked:
...It just seems to me that 3d printed firearms will never be remotely the same quality (accuracy, durability and especially safety)
...
I just don't get the attraction at this point.
...
Thoughts ?

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I don't see the attraction, either. But, it is people who kept fiddling with emerging technologies that didn't attract others that made great discoveries (while most just wasted a bunch of time and money). At present, such guns stand at an unnatural juncture between medieval technology and emerging additive technologies.

• First, printed guns almost invariably adopt center fire metallic case ammunition that was designed to be fired from a metal barrel and thus is not adapted to the limits of the material used by the additive technology.
  
• Second, few guns made with additive technologies have questioned the paradigms of what a gun is and should look like. Additive technology firearms will need to be radically reconfigured to take full advantage of the material and the manufacturing process and that has yet to be done.

Until these conflicts are resolved through different ammunition and the generation of a new optimal design, such guns will remain little more than toys and assassins' weapons.

I wonder whether the improvements in 3d printing quality, design, and materials anticipated by many in this thread will arrive about the same time as highly-efficient batteries and other electronics make personal rail-guns (using electromagnetism to hurl projectiles) just as effective and self-contained as chemically-powered (gunpowder) firearms.

Effectiveness is very subjective. I’ll toss in my two cents and suggest that effectiveness is highly dependent on the design you print. An AR lower would likely be a decent stand in for a polymer factory lower; maybe not the best but serviceable. The liberator pistol is not something I would consider effective for anything other than the “proof-of-concept” that this can be done, a gun can be 3D printed.

-I had a neighbor in Southern Oregon that collected Filipino "brake shop" guns. These guns were made primarily from re-purposed materials that had been modified in small shops and assembled surreptitiously to satisfy the needs of various underground and criminal groups.
Some of these were built to surprisingly high standards, at least visually. I handled a Dan Wesson clone that looked near-perfect - until you looked at the rifling.
There were even travelling tinkers that would take your old plumbing, junk hardware, and wood planks and present you with a marginally serviceable shotgun or rimfire rifle for a modest fee.
Combine this "brake shop" manufacturing with 3D printing ... .

taliv said:

I guess I just don’t know much about Mfg
My fav machine gun rated suppressor is 3D printed from inconel or titanium in a design that literally couldn’t be mfg with normal mills and lathes

Granted the pressure in a suppressor is a lot lower than in the chamber but I’ll bet designs could easily be made to handle enough pressure to be useful.

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3D printed, or cut with a sinker EDM? TDS are the only 3D printed cans I know of.

In general, if a cast part would be acceptably strong, so would a DMLS part. If you need the strength of billet or forged material, then they need to be machined billet or forged parts. Suppressor housing and internals are routinely made with weak 300 series stainless and 6061 aluminum, so yeah, you can get away with castings or DMLS in some areas. But you wouldn't be able to make anything near as light weight as, say, my 8.9 ounce Phoenix 9mm can (that weight includes booster and piston).

3D printing certainly has it's place in the manufacturing world, especially for rapid prototyping, but barring some quantum leap in metallurgy, it will never replace conventional machining methods.

Lets see... I can buy the printer for $500,000 to $1,000,000 plus a ream of metal to make the gun out of. That's kind of expensive for a 1911. At those rates a bluing job would be $100,000? Laser engraving $400,000?
Who pulled the trigger in all those test shots? A person or was it by a person pulling a string?
The whole idea at this point is a wishful thinking and fodder for the anti gun people. Ridiculous waste of money on someones part.

theotherwaldo said:

-I had a neighbor in Southern Oregon that collected Filipino "brake shop" guns. These guns were made primarily from re-purposed materials that had been modified in small shops and assembled surreptitiously to satisfy the needs of various underground and criminal groups.
Some of these were built to surprisingly high standards, at least visually. I handled a Dan Wesson clone that looked near-perfect - until you looked at the rifling.
There were even travelling tinkers that would take your old plumbing, junk hardware, and wood planks and present you with a marginally serviceable shotgun or rimfire rifle for a modest fee.
Combine this "brake shop" manufacturing with 3D printing ... .

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Now you see what I am getting at!Simple,clever designs with standardized, interchangeable parts.This would help minimise the amount of hand fitting needed. Now with the technology behind the 3D printed suppressors by Brevis coming into view, it seems like a 12ga or 20ga shotgun could be made with 3D printing.

taliv said:

https://www.deltapdesign.com/collec...ts/brevis-ii-ultra-5-56-nato-rifle-suppressor
https://www.deltapdesign.com/collec...oducts/brevis-ii-ultra-6-5mm-rifle-suppressor

when i asked them they told me they were printed and they had a patent on printing two metals together as an older version of their can had an inconel blast baffle printed inside the titanium shell. i could be misremembering. i've slept a few times since then

even so, i wonder what kind of pressure, say, a subsonic 300 blk needs. i'll bet those parts would handle it. the delta suppressor i have is on a 10" ar that i've done a lot of high round count stuff with. a quick google search shows bore pressure on my 10.5" 556 is 11,500 psi and 300blk is 35k or so. i'd bet it's doable. or if not currently, that it's not that far off. definitely not impossible

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.300 Blk uses a similar powder charge in a larger bore that is nearly double the volume in a given length, ergo lower pressure, even in top supersonic loadings.

As for those cans, I'd like to hear them in person, but they don't sound very impressive on video, and I had a serious involuntary eyeroll when the proprietor stated that DMLS parts are stronger than billet. Not true at all. What may be true is that the suppressors he makes using toroidal ends and having the baffle system homogenous with the housing creates a webbing in a strong vessel shape, but the material itself is weaker than forged or machined billet parts. Even in an inert atmoshphere, DMLS will still result in a more porous material than forged or drawn metals. As I said before, it's very much like casting or, more accurately, oven sintering.

What about 3D printing a BP revolver? Less pressure and no need for self-contained cartridges.

BilliamB. said:

Effective enough to give Chuck Schumer a seizure.

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Even Chucky knows that the plastic 3D printed guns are crap, but that doesn't mean 3D printed guns are always going to be crap. Everything gets better over time (except Nancy Pelosi's senility) and we're just now seeing the good quality that 3D printed frames/lowers can be. See, the Chucker knows that too and he's trying to cut the legs out from 3D printed guns before they take off. Stopping distribution of the files is one way of doing it, but that's already been struck down by the courts.

The next step is going to be the machines themselves. I'm sure Anti groups like Everytown and Moms Demand Action already have their drafts for bills to be introduced if/when Dems take control that will require every purchaser of a 3D printer to go through a background check.

Twenty states are upset: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...un-company-sue-to-get-files-off-the-internet/

The word "printer" confuses our legislators.

The firearms community needs a reminder of Tor, torproject.org

Onion services were created to defend against tyranny.

The government already knows that Cody Wilson hosted the 3D specs, but future mirrors facing government oppression can host on servers that are accessed through the Tor network.

There's nothing magical or "dark" about setting up a server that can only be accessed through Tor. The setup takes less than an hour.

Take any properly secured web server and rather than have the web program listen to the network device with the external IP address, have it listen to "localhost" only. Download, compile and install the Tor program on that server. The Tor install reads a simple text configuration file that you edit to turn the website into an Onion service.

The Tor website torproject.org has tips on things not to do to protect your site.

https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/tag/homemade-firearms/

Lots of homemade guns out there. Submachines seem easier to make than semis.

Watching the graboids freak out over single-shot guns (the same people who often time proclaim that the 2nd Amendment only applies to single shot muskets) has been deeply amusing.


The graboids, and, by extension their lapdogs in the media have obfuscated the point of why this lawsuit was settled. The issue isn't the 3d printed guns, but rather the fact that distributing 1s and 0s is fundamentally covered by the 1st Amendment's protections of free expression. This was something that was already settled back when the government lost their case against people who were distributing PGP encryption software.

Where this can be a huge issue is that if the original ITAR ruling by the State Department was read broadly enough, it could have been used as a pretext for banning nearly any technical discussion about firearms online whatsoever, including discussions about gun smithing, building an AR, or even reloading data. Of course, reporters, largely being creatures that are easily distracted and who constantly confuse sizzle with steak, get to work obsessing over the crappy 3d printed guns, and give zero attention whatsoever to the fact that this is fundamentally a 1st Amendment issue, albeit one they find detestable.

That printer isn't going to be able to make a barrel or rifle a piece of steel pipe. The barrel will have to come from something, I doubt there are many pieces of pipe that have the internal diameter of most bullets and even then how are you going to rifle it? Equipment to rifle a barrel blank isn't cheap.

George Dickel said:

That printer isn't going to be able to make a barrel or rifle a piece of steel pipe. The barrel will have to come from something, I doubt there are many pieces of pipe that have the internal diameter of most bullets and even then how are you going to rifle it? Equipment to rifle a barrel blank isn't cheap.

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I don't know, use barrel liners and epoxy them in? You'd just have to make a barrel channel then.