I understand the intent, but feel that there are so many other loopholes that put much worse weapons on the street than a printer. Besides, my prints can barely sustain normal use, much less a bullet being fired from them. I would think that this is more of a risk to the person holding the gun than who it’s pointing at.
… No way an ender 3 is going to produce something that doesn’t blow up in your hand.
so. i suggest people get that 150 dollar lol-printer. Should take care of itself.
If you think people aren’t printing firearms with an Ender 3, you are a fool.
an Ender 3’s print quality is too low to reliably handle any of the critical components, even for one or two uses. something like the defcad AR lower receiver (which is for some odd reason designated as “the firearm” under ATF regulations…) can absolutely be printed, but not reliably by an ender 3- at least not a stock ender 3. (the defcad team was using resin printers for the dimensional accuracy.)
in any case, you can go to any big box hardware store, drop around 30 bucks in plumbing parts and some quality time with a dremel will produce a fully automatic firearm. should we now regulate plumbing hardware?
Someone assassinated the former Japanese PM with a block of wood, two small pieces of pipe, and some simple electronics, and that was extremely advanced for an amateur hand crafted firearm
Spend enough time in the sticks as a teenager and I guarantee a pipe shotgun will basically materialize out of thin air at some point
You don’t print the explody bits; you have to purchase things like the barrel and the trigger assembly.
However, I know an engineer at Sig Sauer who printed his own gun and he’s never fired it while holding it…so, still prone to eventual catastrophic failure ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At that point though, you may as well start regulating the purchase of lumber, since it sounds like you could just as easily make the printed components in a basic workshop as with a 3d printer
I suppose technically you could but it would be a hell of a lot of work and you’d need detailed drawings.
The 3d model already has all of the geometry and hole locations required from the manufacturer.
If you know your printer well, all you do is download the model, slice it and press play.
If you have the 3d model, you already have the drawings. Quite literally. Just need to print off some views with measurements, if you want it on paper, otherwise, use the CAD model and get measurements as needed.
At that point, it’s just down to having the tools, skills, and material. Someone with good skills, tools, and material could make the equivalent parts faster and of better quality than a bed-slinger. Someone without the skills… well, they’ll probably have time to build the skills in the process.
Now, when it comes to materials, I think that there’s definite risk there. Wood often exhibits worse shear strength along its grain than well-tuned printers do along layers (a good example of this weakness can be seen in the rear totes of old Stanley-Bailey bench planes - it is a minority of them that have not sheared where the handle meets the mounting section). So, that has to be taken into account in laying out the part in the raw material.
Everything will fail eventually, the question is how long it will take and more importantly if the failure can be predicted.
Not sure how to tell you this, but however amusing… you are wrong. An Ender 3 in the hands of even a moderately experienced 3D hobbyist can absolutely produce a functional firearm.
not really. Well let me put it this way. The firearms that are entirely 3d printed are basically one-shot weapons.
the firearms that are single-printed components (or maybe more,) aren’t printing components that are part of the firing mechanism. for example, the DefCad team, they’re printing lower receiver for an AR. All the lower receiver does is holds the magazine in place for feeding into the chamber. For some technically obscure reason, it’s the part that is defined as “the” firearm for the purposes of registration.
the reason most ghost guns aren’t actually being printed is because there’s easier ways to get better firearms. Like driving to a state that allows the gunshow loophole and buying them cheap and flipping them in NY or whatever. printed ghost guns are… relatively uncommon, overall.
yes it can