Igor, >From a technical standpoint only (I'll leave the politics out of this), the >AR-15 lower receiver (which he successfully printed in ABS plastic - see >www.defensedistributed.com) is the portion which houses the fire control >group. Most are made of 7075 Al forgings, or CNC machined from billet. >However, a few companies offer injection molded varieties which work just >fine. I think the original Armalite designers used 7075 to be on the safe >side, not because they had to. With some adjustments & reinforcements, it is >probably possible to 3d print a plastic AR lower which would function >perfectly. I seem to recall 3d printed ABS is about 70% as strong as molded >ABS so some minor structural reinforcements are probably in order. No >selective laser sintering or other expensive 3d printing processes required.
And yes, that article is obviously political. However, there are a few others on the subject (search 3d printer, defense distributed, etc) that present the facts more clearly. I think the wired.com article that I read wasn't too bad, in case you want to read more on the subject. Matt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
