Wonder when this will become a big story: man creates 3D printed Railgun at home

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usmarine0352_2005

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This is incredible. He also has vides showing it working in the article. If these start showing up being used at crimescenes you wouldn't be able to trace the round. With the instructions on how to build it on the net I'm not sure how long it would be until people start making these.



Apparently it's a railgun and a plasma gun.





http://bgr.com/2015/10/19/handheld-railgun-video-3d-printing/




3D printing used to make first real handheld railgun, which fires plasma projectiles at 560 mph

By Zach Epstein on Oct 19, 2015 at 9:43 AM

If you think the image above looks frightening, you’re right. The crazy contraption pictured in the image is the first portable railgun, a futuristic projectile launcher associated most commonly with the military or NASA. The man in the image above isn’t in the military, and he’s not a NASA engineer. Instead, he’s a civilian who used some engineering smarts, some widely available parts and a 3D printer to create a functioning weapon that can fire graphite, aluminum, tungsten and even plasma projectiles at speeds of more than 560 mph.

Using a combination of 3D printing and widely available components, the man built a functioning handheld railgun that houses six capacitors and delivers more than 3,000 kilojoules of energy per shot. What does it shoot, you might be wondering? So far he has tested the gun using metal rods made of graphite, aluminum and copper-coated tungsten, like the ones pictured below. It can also fire carbon projectiles and teflon/plasma rods. That’s right, this guy built a plasma gun.
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Not sure what a plasma gun is suppose to be.

I know this is a prototype and I'm sure it can be improved, however, in both videos the projectile bounced off the target.
 
I'm assuming a plasma/Teflon projectile uses an electrical arc (ionized gas) to conduct electricity.

Mike
 
560mph = 821ish fps... so.. uh. Given that performance in conjunction with its size, I don't think we have to worry about the scourge of these things yet.
 
I predict it will remain less common at crime scenes than a steel pipe zip gun. Non-issue regarding crime.

From a technical side, pretty cool. Wonder when the ITAR takedown notice is coming.
 
I wonder if someone didn't mean plated Teflon projectiles instead of "Teflon/plasma" projectiles. All the other projectiles are conductive, which makes sense.

Pass a current through an object in a magnetic field, and it will go somewhere. If the magnetic field is generated by the same current, you don't need an actual magnet. Depends on how you arrange the conductors --like this:

http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Railgun-Schema.jpg


On the other hand, at the currents involved, I would not be surprised that the plating on a Teflon projectile might vaporize into a plasma, and that might be the source of the "plasma" wording, and I did see a lot of sparks coming out in part of the video.

Jes' wonderin'. Not unusual for misunderstandings like that to creep into news reports.
 
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Yeah, there's a lot more than 40 Watts of power involved in one shot in that thing. I'll bet it runs into the many-kiloWatt range.
 
Wasn't this issue dealt with about two years ago? I seem to remember some guy in...it might have been Texas...who designed and produced a 3D Printed, single shot, 9mm handgun. (He called it The Liberator" after that cheap single shot handgun of the same name, made in the US and air dropped over France during the war.)

As I recall, the government found some way to kaybosh that pretty quick. Last I heard, the printer software for it was still being hosted, illegally, on Pirate Bay.

Seems to me, if you jump through all the flaming hoops to get the ATF manufacturer license, you should be allowed to make them, but what do I know?
 
"As I recall, the government found some way to kaybosh that pretty quick."

The State Department claimed a crummy 32acp single shot the size of a grapefruit constituted a cutting edge technological breakthrough capable of significantly degrading our strategic standing, globally, and therefore used their powers of regulation to demand a cease & desist to Distributed Defense's distribution of the STL software files. Files which were already being shared by countless other sources no longer subject to State Dept authority overseas. Despite that, DD was never actually charged with anything; just told to stop (and presumably to shut up & keep their nose clean ;))

DD rightly called BS on this power grab, and filed suit. Two years of stone-walling later, their day in court was finally coming. Knowing that pretty much every time ITAR actually comes up for judicial review the government gets spanked (because ITAR is fundamentally at odds with the Constitution in a number of serious ways, but 'national security' scares judges into not striking the whole thing), the State Department set to furiously rewriting the regulations to which they claimed Distributed Defense was subject. That was the ITAR change seeking to stop discussion of firearms technical info online which was proposed/passed some months back, which nearly everyone ignored.* By changing the justification/wording of these regulations if not their effect, the objections initially raised by Distributed Defense were no longer applicable, so their court case has to start all over from square one (awaiting another two-plus years of stonewalling) before being heard.

TCB

*This also occurred about the same time DD was shipping the first "ghost gunner CNC" mini-mills, which included (in the box, rather than online where furriners could get to it) a flash drive with all software needed to produce a lower. I suspect the Liberator merely raised the Agency's ire, but the Ghost Gunner got them legitimately scared enough to make a rather ridiculous claim to power over all technical information tangentially related to firearms.
 
Meh. It's a very cool science project, but the sky isn't falling just yet.

A railgun would be an impressively poor choice for crime.

A railgun like that involves hundreds of dollars worth of capacitors, solid state switches, pressure regulators, high voltage transformers, and who knows what other kind of pricey widgets and geegaws. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that cost $1200 in components alone, as just the capacitors would get you halfway there. And then you still need a 3d printer and an engineer or physicist to assemble and tune it for you.

And all that for a GIANT, heavy, single shot weapon that fires unstabilized projectiles at subsonic velocities. Some of the time.

That, or you could stop by Ace Hardware and build a slam-bang shotgun for a couple dollars.

Or if you were really feeling dangerous, you could even move up to a $150 black powder revolver and be able to fire as many as six shots in a row (through a rifled barrel!).

Ballistically, it's going to obviously be a railgun projectile, and from there it's a pretty short list of who could even build one.

Besides, you ever hear of a paper patched bullet?
 
Yeah, there's a lot more than 40 Watts of power involved in one shot in that thing. I'll bet it runs into the many-kiloWatt range.
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It was a movie reference. From the Terminator.
 
^
Didn't know the source, but I''ve seen that referred to several times. My point was that 40W is a "nothing" power level, at least for a projectile-throwing device like OP's.

I once calculated the HP required to get a 40 gr .22LR bullet up to muzzle velocity in a 20" or so barrel, and it was about 90 HP, or about 67kW (67,000 Watts) under several reasonable assumptions. If my memory is and my arithmetic was right. Feel free to correct me on that one, though.

kozak6 remarked,

A railgun like that involves hundreds of dollars worth of capacitors, solid state switches, pressure regulators, high voltage transformers...
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I don't see why one would need pressure regulators...?

Are you using the archaic term for voltage? As in "tension," or "electrical pressure"?

Terry, 230RN
 
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I don't see why one would need pressure regulators...?
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rail guns use compressed gas to propel the projectile, and then use electrical current to increase velocity.

if you look at the picture in the link, you can clearly see a compressed gas tank on the stock of the rifle
 
"Hand held"? Barely.

Cool science project, but horribly impractical and woefully underpowered as a weapon. PCP air rifles put that thing to shame, let alone actual small arms.

If these start showing up being used at crimescenes you wouldn't be able to trace the round.
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Tracing bullets to guns (let alone to owners) is 100% movie/series fiction.
 
We're looking at the small scale here gents. Big picture - this guy built a prototype handheld railgun on his own. Sure, it's anemic. But in twenty years they won't be, and if you can build them yourself, they're going to be tough to regulate. Same reason the 3D printed guns that fail after 5 firings are important.
 
If Zach thinks "the image above looks frightening", he has led a very sheltered life. If it has not already happened, Hillary will be calling for "common sense" laws to restrict easily availble Rail Guns in her next speech....
 
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Think he'll be invited to the White House (or at least the enormous NRA castle the media assumes exists)?


"Sure, it's anemic. But in twenty years they won't be"
Maybe once they invent fusion, or batteries with higher energy density than uranium. Power has always been the real problem, which is why the Navy's are stuck on destroyers.

A 17cal dart saboted inside a smoothbore 50cal is a much more effective directed energy weapon.

TCB
 
Just a toy. One can legally build, at home, something much more powerful if they want to.
 
This isn't the first guy to make one of theses and post it up to you tube including one guy who made a semi auto one that used a top feed gravity operated magazine
 
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