Hey kids! Print your own gun!! !

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Shoot your friends!

Feel the way GOD must feel when he's holding a gun!! !


Source<-click

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQ6Q3BfbVBU&[/youtube]

What a silly, irresponsible little fellow...

Neat. I wonder why they chose to go with 3D printing and not the more fully developed desktop CNC machines; the pricepoint is similar and the CNC tools can work in metal as well as plastic. I also gotta wonder why they're trying to build an automatic, to my mind a revolver would be much simpler and more likely to succeed using their materials and production strategy. Perhaps I'll email them.

now if only they could print some ammo, they've got something.

That is the problem, isn't it?

I've got a design in my stuff somewhere for something very similar in concept to this, a very low cost revolver made of polymer and aluminum that would be loaded with black powder, fired pezioelectrically, and shoot buckshot or flechettes, obviating the need for a rifled barrel. It would be produced using injection molding and CNC machines in an offshore location, possibly on board a ship, and airdropped to countries like the Sudan where roving bands of lightly armed marauders are terrorizing the local populace. The blackpowder loading and lack of rifling would allow it to be loaded with locally available materials, like a modern blunderbuss, and the production method would make it cheap enough to produce in number and treat as disposable. It would be designed to only last a few reloading cycles, and be supplied with pre-loaded cylinders and spares for rapid reloads.

I still think this thing would actually work, perhaps after I've made my fortune elsewhere...

In the wise words of John Lennon: Happiness is a warm gun, yeah.

The only problem with your idea is that the world already has a gun that is cheap and inexpensive to produce and buy (less than $20 in some war torn African nations). This gun also has plentiful ammo and can be fixed by just about anyone. Of course I am referring to the Kalashnikov, better known in the US (incorrectly) as the AK-47. (It is incorrect because what most of us know as the AK-47 is actually the AK-59 or AKM. The difference is that the original used a milled receiver while the AKM used the much more widely produced stamped steel receiver.) No matter how cheaply you think you can make a new design, you would have to compete with the Kalashnikov, the most produced weapon in the history of mankind. It's so simple to make that they are produced in the Khyber Pass region of Pakistan without the benefit of power tools. Plus, the stupidity of the communist command economy ensured that the former communist countries produced far more than they would ever need. Thus today these surplus weapons are the choice of revolutionaries around the world and will probably continue to be for at least another century.

i'd be worried about some poor slob who found an abandoned specimen [presumably well-past its safe lifespan] someplace, shot it and had the thing blow up on him. i knew someone in the army who had his weapon blow up in his face. double-plus ungood.

What ever happened to sling -shots,there disposable or just a good old fashioned rock to the head as in David in Goliath? Why can't this guy take his brains and invent a better solar cooker instead of a new cheap way to kill someone.We've already got enough of those.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jh9PMULbuFI&feature=related[/youtube]

Maybe cheap to buy now because there are just so damn many of them out there, but not that cheap to produce. Sure you can buy one in war torn parts of the world pretty cheaply, but that price is far above the cost of production, even for the old com-bloc countries. My design also has the interesting attribute of not being legally considered a modern firearm in the US due to it's non-use of metallic cartridges, theoretically allowing it to be sold over the counter, though I don't think that would last long.
It's also not just about the cheapness, but the short lifespan. My gun is designed in such a way that it's not useful for military applications due to it's design and construction, only for limited self defense, thus allowing it to be dropped in number without creating the down the road problems a crate of Kalashnikovs might.

I've got some engineered obsolesce built into the design, the parts that let it fire will wear out long before it becomes unsafe to shoot.

that is a good kind of designed obsolesense.

Yeah. I'm not an anti-gun fanatic--I don't hunt anymore, but I still occasionally shoot skeet and targets (with my 9mm).

However, this just makes no sense to me...

Cheap ubiquitous guns won't protect poor peasants, but they might make the much better armed bad guys shoot first and ask questions later.

This emerging tech is very cool and it has so much potential to be a boon for mankind--especially the poor of the third world....

....but this..... This is a CLOWN application bro.

I worry that a gun made of something like ABS will not be able to tolerate the forces required even for .22 let alone something like 44 magnum or 45 ACP (or even something like 7.62 mm rifle).

If you were able to add nylon threads into the ABS to make a composite then it might be possible to increase the safe working load on the breach but I do not see a way in which it would be possible to print the ABS / nylon composite. Maybe it would be just more easy to make it out of metal.

I do not like the idea of a cheap plastic gun which wears out, even if you make it so that it's firing mechanism has a limited life in terms of the number of shots it can fire. It will still be unsafe. Imagine that you are facing a bad guy with the "plastic popper" and you try to squeeze off a 22 rim fire slug, then at that point you discover that your plastic gun has just given up the ghost then I imagine that you are in a whole world of trouble. You would be better off either with no gun at all or maybe something like a S&W revolver which is likely to last forever if it is treated with respect.

Both swords and plowshares are made with the same materials and skill-sets. 3D printing can be used to manufacture garden tools and aquaponic components.