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  1. #1

    The Hype over 3D printed gun parts

    The Hype Over 3D Printed Gun Parts « Blackwater

    The Hype Over 3D Printed Gun Parts

    By Will Grant
    Courtesy Defense Distributed

    Three-dimensional printed plastic gun parts are getting a lot of headlines these days. And like most conversations that involve guns, people are quick to bring up gun-control laws. Most of those people are missing the points.
    Some see printed guns as a threat: if any one can print a firearm in their basement, what’s keeping terrorists and whackos from doing it? Others see printing guns as an expression of freedom: I’m entitled to manufacture guns for my own personal use, and therefore it’s none of the government’s damn business what I do in my basement.
    At the center of the debate is a group called Defense Distributed—a loose collective of engineers, designers, and a lawyer prototyping plastic firearms components with a 3D printer. In a project called Wiki Weapon, they’ve been experimenting with plans of a printed lower receiver for an AR-15 downloaded from the website Thingiverse.
    On an AR carbine, the only component regulated by the federal government is the lower receiver. Which is the part
    Courtesy Defense Distributed

    with the serial number on it. Which is why the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms tracks it. Which is exactly the reason Defense Distributed is printing it.
    Cody Wilson is the director of Defense Distributed, which is now 501(c)(3) pending organization. A second-year law student at the University of Texas at Austin, Wilson has organized more than dozen people to help with his project. From software gurus in Florida and Kansas to an engineer in Amsterdam, support has come from high and low alike.
    “We get lots of cheerleading from Russia. Guys saying, ‘go, go!’ You can tell they want their guns back,’” Wilson says. “And we get a lot of hate coming from Germany and the UK.”
    In September, Wilson was invited to speak at a technology conference in the UK. When he talked about his project, the crowd disapproved. Ten days later, the company he was leasing his 3D printer from, Stratasys, confiscated the printer, citing a lack of federal firearms license.
    “It is the policy of Stratasys not to knowingly allow its printers to be used for illegal purposes,” the company’s legal counsel wrote to Wilson. “However, we do not intend to engage in a legal debate with you.”
    As per the Gun Control Act of 1968, anyone who manufactures or sells guns or ammunition needs an FFL. But you don’t need a FFL to produce firearms for your own use. There’s also nothing in the law that says it’s illegal to freely distribute firearm schematics over the Internet. Defense Distributed never intended to sell its products. For what it wants to do, Defense Distributed doesn’t technically need an FFL—though Wilson applied for a Type 3 and Type 7 license about two months ago.
    Courtesy Defense Distributed

    Defense Distributed’s latest receiver was made with an Objet printer using photopolymer material. The receiver was functional for six rounds—one test shot and the first five of a ten-round magazine. On the sixth shot, the rearward force of the bolt carrier group broke the buffer tube threading of the lower receiver. The shows the experiment.
    Defense Distributed’s next version will be printed on a cheaper FDM (fused deposition molding) printer using thermoplastics. Wilson and his team expect that thermoplastics will be better suited to the job.
    A lot of the blowhard rhetoric surrounding printed gun parts is that they’ll be undetectable by metal detectors, will violate the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988, also known as the Plastic Guns Law. But plastic gun parts, particularly AR lower receivers, have been available for years.
    The now-defunct company Professional Ordnance made a family of firearms known as Carbon 15, and they were some of the first such rifles made from something other than metal. The receivers as well as several other parts, which received poor reviews, were made entirely of carbon fiber.
    “Carbon 15 really left a bad taste in everybody’s mouth,” says Kino Davis, an firearms consultant from Tucson. “The receivers were made from short-fiber CRP [carbon-reinforced plastic] which is nowhere near as strong as the laminated, long-fiber panels that we think of on race cars and airplanes… Probably the biggest problem though, was that Carbon 15 used several proprietary parts and had some problems with bolts and other parts breaking… I think a lot of folks just associated these problems and the ‘carbon plastic’ name with each other .”
    Cavalry Arms was one of the most famous manufacturers of plastic lowers until it lost its license over illegal machine gun sales. But the plastic lower Cavalry Arms sold was attached to the buttstock, which eliminated the problem Defense Distributed ran into.
    Criticism of a plastic firearm component aside, the fact that printed guns will not have serial numbers is troubling for some. But just like plastic gun parts, there are legal ways to get your hands on a gun without a serial number.
    In Oceanside, Calif., Ares Armor makes it easy for you to make your own gun. They’ll sell you an 80-percent completed AR lower, starting at $80, and help you finish the last 20 percent at their on-site facilities. Three Sundays a month, the company hosts what it calls Build Parties, after which you have a homemade, completely sterile AR lower receiver and can now assemble a gun without a serial number.
    And if you think guns without serial numbers are rare, think again.
    “Let’s just say there are very many of these [guns without serial numbers] being pushed out into the public,” says Ares Armor founder Dimiti Karras, a Marine Corps veteran. “We probably sell 2,000 [unfinished lowers] a month.”
    The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms took an early interest in Ares Armor, which was established three years ago. Every so often, ATF agents pay a visit to Ares Armor, and Karras has invited them in to look at the products. Rumor has it, once the feds saw the rifle components, they wanted one for themselves.
    Any citizen in good standing can make a gun, including Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed. While gun companies may not like that, it is and always has been the law. But they shouldn’t worry just yet about printed gun components being cheaper.
    Defense Distributed is using a half-million-dollar printer, according to Wilson. It took about six and a half hours to print the lower receiver in the video and cost about $180 of material.
    Neither the National Rifle Association nor the Second Amendment Foundation has shown much excitement about
    Courtesy Defense Distributed

    printing plastic gun parts. Even the old loafers at my local gun shop had misgivings. But the constitutional right to making guns, to printing guns, to the WikiWeapon project is there.
    “If you do not exercise your right out of fear of losing it, then I say you never had that right in the first place,” Wilson says. “That’s the stance I’m taking on this whole thing.”
    Kerras of Ares Armor likely agrees with him. A statement at the bottom of the Ares Armor website reads: “Remember that the Constitution was meant to control the amount of power the government has. Second Amendment.”
    Maybe a headline from Smithsonian Magazine’s blog sums it up best: It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone 3D Prints a Gun.

  2. #2

    Re: The Hype over 3D printed gun parts

    total polymer lower rifle stocks

    GWACS Armory, LLC, is proud to present the CAV-15 MKII, a versatile, lightweight, durable rifle that resists corrosion and impact better than traditional aluminum based AR15-type weapons.

    GWACS Armory acquired the manufacturing rights, tools, dies and equipment of the Cavalry Arms CAV-15 and will continue to produce the quality lower receivers that the shooting community has come to respect.

    We offer a life time warranty on our CAV-15 MKII and will also honor the warranty of the CAV-15 MKII offered by Cavalry Arms. Contact our staff for further details.

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  3. #3

    Re: The Hype over 3D printed gun parts

    Click, Print, Gun: The Inside Story of the 3D-Printed Gun Movement

    By Erin Lee Carr



    Being a 3D-printing novice, I was once somewhat skeptical of the promise behind what's being billed as a truly game-changing technology. I saw Makerbot CEO Bre Pettis on the cover of Wired in late September, and while the novelty of the process incited wonder in my inner 10-year-old, I didn’t think much about it after the fact.

    Enter Cody R. Wilson. Wilson is a 25-year-old University of Texas law student working to build semiautomatic weapons using 3D printers. His name first came up in conversation with a colleague after Wilson posted an Indiegogo pitch video demonstrating his intended use for a newly-acquired Stratasys 3D printer, which Stratasys subsequently repossessed.

    I was intrigued. Wilson seemed to be an articulate and tech-savvy mouthpiece for a movement that a large portion of the country would deem dangerous and off-limits. To find out more about his fight against gun control, we flew down to his home base of Austin, Texas, where we first met Wilson at his apartment. I wasn’t sure what to make of him. He checked his phone every 10 seconds. He had a hard time making eye contact. Every other sentence ended with “Do you know what I mean?” He spoke on topics ranging from progress in the 3D-printed gun movement to American politics to the inherent revolutionary nature of bitcoins.

    For more on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm's stance on 3D-printed guns, check out this piece by Motherboard's Adam Clark Estes.

    Soon enough Wilson showed us the CAD file on his computer for his lower receiver. Over us, a five-foot American flag hung as a self-described ironic statement. He’s a knowledgeable guy, and spoke at length about the development of Defense Distributed’s lower receiver, telling me that failure was a part of the scientific process. As he said, every time one of his designs fails, it offers more insight into what designs work.

    Social niceties aside, we were there to watch Wilson build some guns. To be clear, Defense Distributed doesn’t print entire guns--at least not yet. Instead, Wilson’s team focuses on printing AR-15 lower receivers, which house most of the operating parts of that firearm.

    It is also the part of the gun that’s considered a gun by the government. Other parts like barrels and stocks, especially those for the highly-modular AR-15 platform, can be purchased online, and often with no age restriction or background check needed.

    Wilson is also focused on 3D printing 30-round magazine clips in anticipation of Senator Dianne Feinstein’s assault weapon ban bill, which would limit magazine size. To Wilson, the work is partly an effort to expose what he considers the futility of gun regulation. “[Magazines] prove the point much better than the lower receiver that you can’t ban a box and a spring,” he said.

    Printing a lower receiver takes seven hours, but there is something particularly ominous about seeing the ARS plastic begin to take shape as the lower receiver is born.

    Whatever your thoughts on gun control, it’s impossible to deny that the 3D-printed gun movement is something that doesn’t fit into the current legal framework. It’s either exciting or scary–or perhaps both–and that polarity is something Wilson recognizes, and which he knows how to bend to his advantage. It all made for a rather confusing week in Texas, during which we were often alone with just Wilson, who appears to have few distractions outside of his work with Defense Distributed. He’s created his own world in this mission, where friends or law school grades take a backseat to the message.

    It’s impossible to know where that mission will end, but just as it’s clear that 3D printing is set to boom, it’s clear that Wilson and company have changed the boundaries of what that boom will bring.

    Read more: Click, Print, Gun: The Inside Story of the 3D-Printed Gun Movement | Motherboard
    Follow us: @motherboard on Twitter | motherboardtv on Facebook
    ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    over 100 round mark on same receiver.....

  4. #4

    Re: The Hype over 3D printed gun parts

    “Download this gun”: 3D-printed semi-automatic fires over 600 rounds
    And the Department of Justice says there's nothing illegal about it, either.

    by Cyrus Farivar - Mar 1 2013, 6:00am PST


    The white portion of this AR-15, known as the "lower," was manufactured using 3D printing.
    Defense Distributed

    Cody Wilson, like many Texan gunsmiths, is fast-talkin’ and fast-shootin’—but unlike his predecessors in the Lone Star State, he’s got 3D printing technology to help him with his craft.

    Wilson’s nonprofit organization, Defense Distributed, released a video this week showing a gun firing off over 600 rounds—illustrating what is likely to be the first wave of semi-automatic and automatic weapons produced by the additive manufacturing process.

    Last year, his group famously demonstrated that it could use a 3D-printed “lower” for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle—but the gun failed after six rounds. Now, after some re-tooling, Defense Distributed has shown that it has fixed the design flaws and a gun using its lower can seemingly fire for quite a while. (The AR-15 is the civilian version of the military M16 rifle.)

    The lower, or "lower receiver" part of a firearm, is the crucial part that contains all of the gun's operating parts, including the trigger group and the magazine port. (Under American law, the lower is what's defined as the firearm itself.) The AR is designed to be modular, meaning it can receive different types of “uppers” (barrels) as well as different-sized magazines.

    “This is the first publicly printed AR lower demonstrated to withstand a large volume of .223 without structural degradation or failure,” Wilson wrote on Wednesday. “The actual count was 660+ on day 1 with the SLA lower. The test ended when we ran out of ammunition, but this lower could easily withstand 1,000 rounds.”

    Already, he says, over 10,000 people have downloaded the lower CAD file, and more have downloaded it through BitTorrent.
    “I just made an AK-47 magazine—I’ve got it printing as we speak”

    While it may be easy to paint Wilson as a 2nd Amendment-touting conservative, the 25-year-old second-year law student at the Univeristy of Texas, Austin told Ars on Thursday that he’s actually a “crypto-anarchist.”

    “I believe in evading and disintermediating the state,” he said. “It seemed to be something we could build an organization around. Just like Bitcoin can circumvent financial mechanisms. This means you can make something that is contentious and politically important—not just a multicolored cookie cutter—but something important. It’s more about disintermediating some of these control schemes entirely and there’s increasingly little that you can do about it. That’s no longer a valid answer.”

    He added, “The message is in what we’re doing—the message is: download this gun.”

    And he practices what he preaches. The group’s entire set of design files are made available, for free, on DEFCAD, an online library for everything from grips to lowers to magazines.

    “I just made an AK-47 magazine—I’ve got it printing as we speak,” he added. “[I’ve got a] Glock 17, we got a bunch coming, man. We’ve got a library of magazines.”

    Wilson’s group was founded last year on similar principles:

    The specific purposes for which this corporation is organized are: To defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and affirmed by the United States Supreme Court, through facilitating global access to, and the collaborative production of, information and knowledge related to the 3D printing of arms; and to publish and distribute, at no cost to the public, such information and knowledge in promotion of the public interest.

    Here are .223 Remington bullets loaded into a 3D-printed magazine.
    Defense Distributed
    Totally legal

    So that raises the question: is this legal? For now, it would appear so.

    “There are no restrictions on an individual manufacturing a firearm for personal use,” a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) spokesperson told Ars. “However, if the individual is engaged in business as a firearms manufacturer, that person must obtain a manufacturing license.”

    Wilson said that he’s applied for a federal firearms license in his own name with the ATF in October, and he expects to hear a response “any day now.” The ATF did not respond to our request for confirmation of Wilson’s claims.

    Specifically, Wilson said he's looking to become a Class 2 Special Occupational Taxpayer, as licensed under federal law (PDF), which would allow him to become a dealer under the National Firearms Act.

    The law student said that anyone with the same type of 3D printer (“SLA resin and P400 ABS on a used Dimension”) could replicate his efforts with “9 to 12 hours” of print time and “$150 to $200” in parts. "We’ve proven that you can build one for $50,” he said, presuming the builder is using lower quality materials. (Dimensions typically sell in the $30,000 range—but Wilson says his results could be duplicated using the less-expensive Ultimaker ($1,500) or Reprap.”)

    Assuming Defense Distributed’s AR-15 lower costs around $150 to print, it likely won't end up being price-competitive with other, commercially available polymer AR-15 lowers—a few minutes of Google searching turned up options priced at $135 to $170, depending on the manufacturer.

    Of course, lots of 3D printing enthusiasts extol the fact that the price of the technology is rapidly falling—as we reported previously, a California company announced a $600 model last year.

    Some experts who have been following the world of 3D printing for a while say that from a policy perspective, not much has changed in terms of firearm production, even if the parts are cheaper to make.

    “When you're thinking about it from a policy standpoint [the question is], was this possible before 3D printing? If the answer is yes, what was the existing policy response?” said Michael Weinberg, a staff attorney at Public Knowledge.

    “Has this fundamentally changed the dynamic in a way that we need to revisit the response? The answer strikes me as no. It's amazing. You can imagine a world where the 3D printer is accessible to people—I am not convinced that we need a 3D printing-specific solution.”
    An earlier model of the 3D-printed AR-15 lower resulted in a crack by the rear takedown pin.
    Defense Distributed

    “The guns that will be”

    Since December 2012, Wilson and his team have been hard at work on two problems. The first was the fact that the lower’s “buffer tower” (the circular ring part jutting upward that the “upper” fits into) kept breaking—that’s what caused the initial failure that prevented the gun from firing more than six rounds of 5.7x28FN bullets.

    To fix that, the group re-engineered the buffer tower so it had increased exterior thickness. “We doubled or tripled the thickness,” Wilson said.

    With that fix under their belt, the modern gunsmiths tried firing with .223 Remington bullets (standard in an AR-15), which raised the firing range to about 20 rounds before a failure—but that wasn’t good enough.

    By the end of the month, there was a different failure, this time on the “rear takedown pin,” where a metal pin fits between the upper and the lower, connecting them together solidly. There, the 3D-printed plastic was cracking around the pin, making the gun less safe to use.

    “There was so much force concentrating around it that that was the failure place,” Wilson said. “At first we started using bigger bosses and using longer pins and realized that it’s still a cross-sectional area. We changed the dimensions of the rear takedown pins.”

    He explained that they’ve changed pin design entirely, adding “more surface area around these pins,” as well as an “internal” 90-degree angle, along with various curves and “steps and risers” that take advantage of the fact that the housing is made of plastic, not metal.

    “The thing was still built like it would be made out of metal,” he said. “This is about plastic, and everything needs to be curves. It has to act like more of a spring.”

    And that, he points out, is the ultimate lesson in gun manufacturing.

    “The idea is not to print components for guns that are, but the guns that will be,” he said.

    For now, though, Wilson said that Defense Distributed has essentially taken over the bulk of his time, and he’s effectively become a part-time amateur engineer.

    “I don’t go to [law school] class, but I do pass the exams—here’s looking at you [American Bar Association]!” he told Ars.

    Defense Distributed, Wilson says, receives “around $100” in daily donations, and he has an operating budget of about $2,400 monthly. He says that the next phase will be to publish “primers” teaching people specifically how to make such weapons.

    “I don’t consider myself a tech guy, but I do consider myself a crypto-anarchist,” he said.

    “I mean the philosophy that Tim May expressed, he predicted WikiLeaks and digital currency. [What I mean is] that the Internet and cryptography are these anarchic tools that can allow for the expanse of citizen action. We like the idea of the market becoming completely black and starving the nation-state from all the money they claim.”
    Last edited by airdog07; April 24th, 2013 at 04:04 AM.

  5. #5

    Re: The Hype over 3D printed gun parts


  6. #6

    Re: The Hype over 3D printed gun parts


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