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Welcome to the dark side of 3D printing.
The hobby is best known for creating colorful toys and trinkets, but some enthusiasts are working on design files that would allow anyone to print a working gun. These don't exist yet, but some believe it's only a matter of time.
Why would a 3D-printed gun be appealing? For one, it could potentially be cheap. You can buy a preassembled 3D printer for about $500. A spool of ABS plastic to print with goes for $50. Depending on where you shop, you can buy .38 Special ammunition for 30 cents a round. The plans will undoubted be distributed free like so many MP3s.
In fact, plans for working gun parts already exist. They can be found on a site called Thingiverse and on similar sites, alongside thousands of free plans for toys, jewelry, tools, and design equipment.
Thingiverse is a creation of Brooklyn, N.Y.-based MakerBot and its CEO, Bre Pettis. Pettis and his company have become the de facto faces of 3D printing thanks to regular appearances in mainstream and tech media talking about how 3D printers democratize manufacturing. Pettis usually demonstrates this idea with brightly colored remote-control cars, robots, and other toys made with MakerBot printers. MakerBot and Pettis don't really talk about files related to gun parts.
That doesn't mean the issue has gone unnoticed, with the intersection of 3D printing and firearms having made the news a few times this year. In June, Michael "HaveBlue" Guslick reported on his blog about successfully test-firing a homemade gun whose key component, the lower receiver, he made from ABS plastic on a '90s-era Stratasys FDM 1600 3D printer.
And in August, Forbes' Andy Greenberg wrote about a group called Defense Distributed, which has some lofty goals as mapped out in the video below. In practical terms, their immediate aim is to create a design file for what they call a Wiki Weapon, a functional, 3D-printed firearm.
The increased attention on printable guns comes as Defense Distributed is approaching a firing test, said Cody Wilson, a University of Texas graduate student and the chief spokesman for the group. Depending on the outcome of that testing, 3D-printing companies, file-hosting sites, and law enforcement and legislative groups may have to tackle a challenging set of questions regarding the manufacture and regulation of firearms, both in this country and abroad.
All of this might sound exciting, alarming, or nonsensical, depending on your personal beliefs and familiarity with guns and gunsmithing. Setting aside any moral leanings, the fact is that the idea will need to overcome significant material and legislative hurdles before you can crank out a working, legal, 3D-printed gun in the United States. On the physical side, the ABS printing plastic might not be strong enough to make a stable enough weapon. And law-abiding, gunsmithing Americans must first face numerous federal, state, and local gun regulations and bureaucratic procedures that may not take kindly to people printing their own firearms.
None of that means printing a gun is impossible.
Darwin Award, or upending the means of production?
On his blog, Haveblue.org, Guslick offers thorough documentation of the process he followed to design, print, fine-tune, and test his 3D-printed receiver. Guslick also addresses the reception to his project by the greater 3D-printing community, as well as the ensuing media swirl and the feasibility of the Defense Distributed project. All of those topics are worth reading about, but that last part will be of particular interest to would-be gunmakers.
You can make a receiver like Guslick's out of plastic because it houses only the basic mechanical parts of a firearm -- the trigger mechanism, the magazine, and other components. It's the barrel of a gun and/or the firing chamber, both of which you attach to the receiver, that must be strong enough to contain the heat and explosive pressure that comes from firing a round. A project like that of Defense Distributed and its Wiki Weapon poses a much harder challenge, as Guslick explains on his site (links added where appropriate):
The problem is that even the strongest 3D-printable thermoplastic currently available for the FDM process (Ultem 9085) doesn't even have half the tensile strength needed to withstand the 24,000 psi maximum allowed chamber pressure of the .22LR round as defined by SAAMI (the Sporting Arms and Manufacturer's Institute).
As such, yes, a 100 percent 3D-printed gun made on a RepRap could certainly go "bang," but even with a barrel of large enough diameter to keep it from exploding, there would be so much deformation in the bore that most of the available energy would be sapped by gas leakage around the projectile (to say nothing of the utter lack of accuracy). In the end, you'd have a smoking, charred crater left for a barrel bore after the single shot.
Wilson at the University of Texas says he intends to find out just what's possible with ABS plastic. "I'm excited about the question, because I'm interested to see how it fails," he told CNET.
That doesn't mean Wilson expects to fail. He referred me to this list of barrel pressure tolerances, and said Defense Distributed plans to test .38 Special ammunition, as well as .45 Long Colt, both of which have lower maximum pressure output than the .22. And according to Wilson, "operational pressure is also about half of the SAAMI-suggested maximum tolerances."
Bringing in a specialist
Ryder Washburn is the vice president of Specialists Ltd., the East Coast's largest provider of prop weaponry for film, TV, and theater. "What we try to do is the opposite of what you're talking about," Washburn said. "We want to take as much 'gun' out of our products as possible. Essentially we want to stay 10 feet back from the edge of making an actual firearm. But in order to do that, you have to know where the edge is."
I asked Washburn about Wilson's likelihood of success. "Using lower-pressure ammunition sounds like a good decision, but it depends on how you define success. If his goal is to fire a bullet and not blow his hand off, I give him a 50 percent chance."
To my disappointment, I did not get to meet Washburn at his SOHO office in New York ("It's pretty hectic here," he told me). Instead, we met at a nearby coffee shop.
"People get excited by additive manufacturing [like 3D printing] because it seems like you're making something out of thin air. But it has been possible to make guns with reductive technology, like a CNC mill, for years, and it works the same way as a 3D printer. Most of the work goes on in 3D-modeling software. Then you take the design file from the computer and send it to the machine to build. You can make a working metal gun with a $3,000 CNC machine. If all you want to do is make a cheap gun, you can go down to Home Depot and build one with $20 worth of parts."
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