3D Printing and Guns
I’ve read several of the articles out there about this fool who printed a 3D gun, and now a bunch of other even bigger fools who work for the government who think its their duty to put a stop to it all. Last time I talked about guns on this blog stirred some opinions. I expect this article will too, but this time it actually crosses into the engineering side of things via the 3D printing, so it’s not as off topic as it was last time.
My first exposure to 3D printed parts was almost 20 years ago. I worked for a pressure sensor manufacturer, and we needed to make a bunch of prototypes. We quoted 3 processes: machining a simplified part out of plastic, molding a simplified part from a urethane mold, and detailed parts made from our 3D CAD data using Stereo Lithography. We opted for Stereo Lithography. The process was technically a bit different from today’s 3D print, and the materials were much different, but the inputs and outputs were about the same.
In those days I created the data either in AutoCAD 10 or in Mechanical Desktop. They were crude tools, but they worked for the small sensor housings we were creating.
The parts were over $100 each for something about the size of a pack of cigarettes, and we learned quickly that the material had a lot of limitations, especially under a combination of heat and pressure. But in the end they did what they needed to do. We used the process more in the future.
The history of improvements in additive manufacturing processes, fused deposition, SLA, SLS, or what ever you may have called it through the years shows a steady progress of hardware, process and materials. It hasn’t been until recently that the price point for the machine starts getting down into the retail range that the full-blown retail insanity of the uninitiated masses has come to bear.
First, you have the people who assume this is new technology, and don’t understand any component of it. They assume you can 3D print Air Jordans or Rolexes or a steak dinner. You’ve read stuff in the mainstream press where people have said things like that as well as I have. I’m not saying those things will never be printed, but it may be another 20-30 years before we can print a reasonable shoe from multiple durable flexible materials. It may be another 50-80 years before we can print metallic stuff with good properties including surface finish. And I assume it will never be worthwhile to print food, because you will just eat the raw materials instead.
Then you combine people who don’t know anything about additive processes with people who both fear and know nothing about guns. And as the coup de grace, you elect them to public office or give them a job in front of a TV camera. Frankly I had expected that these same people would have written legislation to ban pressure cookers, backpacks, and fireworks by now. Where’s the outrage?
If you read the reporting on this topic, reporters refer to the CAD data as “blueprints”. One article claimed there were no metal parts aside from a non-functional ID badge. (You ought to see the plastic spark against the shell casing). I fully expected to see someone characterize this as semi-automatic, since all you had to do was shoot (without destroying the gun), and put a new barrel on it with another shell. The reporting reflected clearly that the reporters understood neither 3D print nor guns.
Some of the reporting called this “the first 3D printed gun in the world”. I know guys who design guns for a living, and I know they use rapid prototyping techniques. This idiot in Texas is not the first. He might be the first one dumb enough to put live ammunition in one and set it off, but he wasn’t the first to 3D print a gun. Remember that there are legitimate uses for guns other than killing people, just as there are legitimate uses for 3D print other than getting your name in the news. Don’t condemn guns or 3D printing, just condemn morons who don’t understand the purpose of either.
Creating a 3D printed gun is an exercise in stupidity. The main person its a danger to is the person who pulls the trigger. It’s like a grenade without a delay. You just pull the trigger and it blows up in your hand. In order to print with decent materials, the machine you use has to be much more expensive than the garage version, and the materials are much more expensive as well. Let’s see how much it would cost to blow your hand off with one of these things:
- $4000 – CAD software to make design
- $2000 – training to use CAD software
- $2000 – computer to use CAD software
- $10,000 – printer that can create quality parts
- $2000 – training to use the printer
- $100/gal – material for printing
___________________________
~ $20,000 plus medical bills, which for reconstructing your hand will probably run $250,000.
Or you could walk down to the pawn shop and get a real gun that’s much safer for $350.
Yes, you can buy a printer for less than $1000, but the resulting parts will barely be watertight, and probably won’t hold up to even a .22 round.
Making a spectacle of giving away the CAD data for a 3D printed gun is just going way out of your way to annoy people with no sense of humor, and more power than brains. The articles I read said this guy took a month to design the gun. With the 16 parts involved, it should have taken much less if he had any idea what he was doing. Would you print this thing, designed by a guy who probably had no clue what he was doing, and set off an explosion in your hand intentionally?
At best, this device is a one-shot disposable gun/grenade. It uses a nail as a makeshift firing pin, which is as likely to hit you between the eyes as anything, and I can only imagine the properties of SLA materials to create a spring. You’d better be close to your target, too. This gun doesn’t do anything that a responsible gun owner or anyone else for that matter would want a gun to do.
Intentionally taunting the legal system and various federal agencies and Fate herself for zero return reward is going to gain this guy an advanced education in picking up soap in federal prison showers. And it will serve him right. What a God damned idiot.
I’m a gun owner and advocate of second amendment rights, but this is a needless provocation, and a stupid exercise on top of that. The best we can hope is that as the CAD data is disseminated through Pirate Bay, we could lend everyone who wants one a printer, and maybe Darwin can help us self-remove some of the stupid from the gene pool.
Another good article about the 3d printed gun from the Australian perspective in Wired magazine:
Oh, and here’s a busted gun.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/24/australian-police-3d-printed-gun
Hello Matt.. yes, sadly he’s a opportunist.
Hey matt,
I’m in New York where possession of a hand gun without a carry permit (which are impossible to get) is a mandatory one year. And even as a liberal independent I’m getting sick and tried of the pure lack of common sense on both sides of this issue. In high school we all made .22 zip guns from plumbing parts with doubled up rubber bands and a nail as the firing mechanism. Stupid? yes, but it still fired. That said the only comment I’ve heard which even begins to resemble a valid point about 3D printed guns, is that being plastic they can get through metal detectors (the barrel and shell casings not withstanding). however and again, I made a plastic 4 shot .22 with a fiber reenforced ceramic barrel 20 years ago. This too would not be picked up by metal detectors and is again nothing new. The chickens are all in a fluster. It’ll settle down. Hollywood will of course totally inaccurately represent this non danger in some move but in the long run it’s a non issue. Does this mean I can’t bring a makerbot on a plane cause I might “print” a gun in flight?
@CaseyG
I can completely understand that, if the metal parts underwent annealing and heat treatment. 3D print might use materials similar to powder metal process, which compresses powder in a die then uses a series of thermal processes. Many gun parts and automotive transmission parts are made with the powder metal process.
@Conor
Yeah, I like that too.
@Paul Salvador
Paul, this guy isn’t a closet genius designer. He’s an attention seeking lawyer. I don’t see anything positive coming from this at all.
@ralphg Ralph… I do know of a gun manufacturer that created a metal Rapid Proto gun and fired it successfully about 600 times. Of course the RP machine that was used was at least $1,000,000. As I say though this is a reputal gun manufacturer that tested this in a safe fashion.
The best article on the 3d printed gun I’ve seen.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/10/oh_no_its_the_plastic_3d_gun/
whether for good or bad or artist expression,…most of these weapon designers in their garage are very intelligent and very much aware of materials and processes required to attain their goals.
i dont condone guns but i appreciated good design and know in my career not to under estimate what is or not possible.
Yeah, this is part of the guy’s crime. He does his on a high end printer, and then the articles suggest that hobbyists can do the same thing. It’s irresponsible.
Most of the people here are professionals. We have every right to scoff at a lawyer when he publishes his own inherently unsafe mechanical design. We’d be wrong to do anything else.
No one is going to “perfect” this. Part of design is materials. And part of materials is process. There is nothing you can do to a plastic gun to make it a good idea. Even laser sintered metal – see Ralph Grabowski’s comment above. Maybe you could make a gun barrel out of powdered metal, but that’s a different process with different machinery.
I’m not sure my estimates were conservative. It has taken 20 years to get from the initial brittle materials to what we have today. Comparing 3d print to the space program is not a fair comparison. The whole country put its money and brains behind getting to the moon. You didn’t even know about 3D printing until yesterday, or whenever. It hasn’t had the same priority. Materials development is expensive, and some guy in his garage isn’t going to come up with a wonder material that withstands explosions or is flexible/durable enough to wear as a shoe.
While I agree with you overall you take a very condescending superiority tone. These guys may not be engineers but I’ve been following them since they first set off to develop a 3d printable firearm. They certainly didn’t use a hobbyist machine as they bought a used industry level printer. Maybe their motives included getting some fame for for themselves but I think it’s a noble effort to take newer technologies and push the boundaries of society. People and engineers laughed at them when they announced their goals. They succeeded. Maybe it isn’t the best design and is in fact dangerous but I guarantee you more people will tinker and perfect it. The only fault I see is with the government, the media, and all of the people who irrationally fear guns. People dismissed bitcoin as a silly idea intended only for criminal use and yet here we are with the entire financial sector covering it and wanting a piece of the pie. On a different note your estimates for 3d printing achieving better material properties and capabilities is very conservative. In roughly 60 years we went from first flight to moon walking. Technology is an exponential trend and research at the nanometer level will only push additive manufacturing to greater abilities and I’d bet within half the time you predict.
I find it rather strange that owning a gun is a right. Designing a gun and building a gun is a crime. Better watch those engineers and designers, they have ideas.
..may i remind all…there are and have always been great weapons designers who are NOT engineers or formally educated..
will+way+imagination= ?
and yes,..plastic guns have been made.. this is not new… just typical bubble headed bleach blonde news and political pundits sucking our brains dry, taking away rights and spreading fud for a $.
btw.. i do not like guns and i refuse to work on weapons designs,.. but i believe people have the rights per the interpretation (which needs to be updated) of our laws.
imho,.. 9 times out of 10,… gun+human=coward
Good one, Matt. We have a maxim at my workplace. “Nothing will ever be foolproof, fools keep raising the bar”.
Amen, Matt. My thoughts exactly. What’s the saying, the one about 1 guy ruining it for the rest of everyone? It’s idiots like this that will end up getting technology like 3D printers banned and/or regulated. And all for what? So he can get his 15 minutes of fame? He could care less about the real potential that 3D printing has to revolutionize manufacturing and product technology. He seems to just get a kick out of poking an angry bear in the eye with a sharp stick.
Perhaps he should just go do something worthwhile like take his kids to the beach.
I don’t know why violence is so prominent in the American psyche. Seems like if your country isn’t beating up on another everyone is getting prepared to shoot their neighbours. Very strange mentality IMO. What about the Boston police trying to ‘arrest’ the kid in the boat. Sounded like 100 cops shot off about 3000 rounds in about a minute. Despite that only a few rounds hit the boat yet alone injured the guy. Lets face it though they tried to kill him, well exterminate is probably a better description, not detain him for charges and a fair trial. On top of that you had what seemed like a thousand army personnel patrolling with machine guns and assault rifles doing house to house searches like it was Iraq. I know they do things big in America but it looked just way over the top. Seems to be the same instinct: if you have a problem get out your gun and put your brain away in the drawer until later… Maybe everyone watches too many old Westerns as a kid? dunno… (always felt sorry for the Indians myself…)
Matt,
Unlike a lot of British peeps (a certain Mr Piers Morgan for example), I’ve no axe to grind on the whole gun control issue. We don’t really get the American obsession with them, I suppose. Politics aside, what worries me most about this is the plain and simple fact that building these things is madness…
The guy at Defense Distributed needs to be stopped. It’s about as stupid as it gets. The facts are that he’s using and inconsistent process at best, and the most widely available machines (the MakerBots of the world) while using a nominally similar build process, the results are massively different to a Stratasys machine.
The parts are less dense, the layers aren’t as well adhered to one another and the materials are similarly different.. Like you said, its a grenade waiting to happen.. Build it in sintered metals, and you’ve got the same, but with heavier, hotter parts flying out of your hand.
Being outside the US course means that getting access to the munitions is also an entirely different kettle of fish. You simply can’t obtain them in most of Europe. If you can, chances are you can get a gun anyway. A proper one. That won’t leave you blind.
Cody Wilson is a law student. I’ve a distinct feeling he’s trying to make his name for that purpose, rather than anything else. Would you use a gun designed by a lawyer? Apparently, his website has “gone dark”. Gone dark? I think what he means is that he’s shitting a brick about when then FBI comes after him for arms export
Thought not.
On a similar subject, I went to the opening of a 3D printer store in London last week.. They had spectacles frames off a MakerBot on sale. Built from a data set from Thingiverse. No structural testing, no material checks, no standards compliance. It’s utter stupidity. And they were 20 quid. Yeah, I’d rather pay a few quid more for Ray Bans and be able to see, thanks.
That, to me, is just as worrying as a paranoid delusional legal eagle in Texas blowing his own hand off, if not more so.
Al
Great Post Matt. The hype around this is laughable… Because, yeah now criminals are going to be buying 3d printers like they’re goin out of style and start mass producing guns. Good to see someone shed a little common sense on the subject.
“The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a 3D printer is a good guy with a 3D printer.”
I am getting really tired of all this. If the government would just ban everything and do the right thing by reducing our carbon footprint and ban electricity, fossil fuels and their derivatives and then ban thinking none of us would ever get hurt. And as a bonus the new thought challenged individuals could all then be employed by the government creating huge numbers of jobs by adding to the multitude currently employed there. Something needs to be done!!!
The 3D printing gun press release is just the first spark, there will be a lot of idiots trying to improve this rough idea.
In an episode of CSI:NY earlier this year, a guy makes a gun from sintered metal 3D printing. The episode was realistic: the gun blew up with the second shot.
Or any fool with a little milling machine in his garage could have been making simple guns for the past 50 years.