I've been following this 3D printed gun issue closely. It's one of the most inflammatory of the many issues surrounding the transformational 3D printing technology that will democratize a number of industries.
Yes, the HuffPo article is very political, as is to be expected. I have one scratch-built Hadron ORD Bot printer, assembled and awaiting electronics, and a second Hadron kit that I haven't started. I'm a bit swamped with a couple of other CNC projects, but I'll be getting back to the Hadrons ASAP. I have a small online company that sells firearms accessories. I want to use the 3D printers to manufacture firearm accessories that are too complex to machine cost effectively, and the products are too low volume to injection mold cost effectively. So far, 3D printing has been the realm of engineers who want overnight prototypes and hobbyists who like to play around and make geeky things. I believe 3D manufacturing is inevitable. My second Hadron will have three extruders and will print three identical parts at the same time for improved throughput. There is much work to be done to make 3D printing technology viable for short run manufacturing, and I look forward to the challenges. There is a hacker motto that */Information Wants To Be Free/*. The design of a firearm is information, and as I stated in an email to an engineer friend last week concerning 3D printed firearms, there is no putting that genie back in the bottle. I'll avoid the politics too, as this isn't the place for it, but from a technical perspective, hating on some application of new technology isn't going to slow it down in the least. The printed AR-15 receiver was modified slightly to accommodate the material substitution, but the optimal solution is to design a firearm specifically for 3D printing. It's amazing how simple and inexpensive it would be to print a very short range defensive weapon. In the US, there are laws regulating such activities. I think most of these are bad laws, because they're the type of laws that prevent good people from activities that harm nobody while not doing anything to prevent bad people from harming others. That being said, I don't violate these bad laws... not even late at night in my basement workshop when nobody is watching. For the record, I thought it was very crummy that the management and/or marketing people at Stratasys repossessed the 3D printer when there was publicity over its use to print a functioning firearm. Does HP confiscate a printer if you print a picture of a gun that offends people, or pr0n, or.... I guess that's another reason for me to build my own 3D printer, so I OWN it, as opposed to buying or leasing a Stratasys 3D printer... although I already had about 30,000 other rea$ons not to buy a Stratasys 3D printer. :-) My engineer friend that I mentioned earlier owns one of those $35,000 Stratasys Dimension 3D printers. I warned him not to print any gun parts. On 10/15/2012 08:19 AM, Matthew Herd wrote: > 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 > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. 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