3d Gun Bullets
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A burgeoning subculture of 3-D printed gun enthusiasts dreams of the day when a lethal firearm can be downloaded or copied by anyone, anywhere, as easily as a pirated episode of Game of Thrones. But the 27-year-old Japanese man arrested last week for allegedly owning illegal 3-D printed firearms did more than simply download and print other enthusiasts' designs. He appears to have created some of his own.
Among the half-dozen plastic guns seized from Yoshitomo Imura's home in Kawasaki was a revolver designed to fire six .38-caliber bullets–five more than the Liberator printed pistol that inspired Imura's experiments. He called it the ZigZag, after its ratcheted barrel modeled on the German Mauser Zig-Zag. In a video he posted online six months ago, Imura assembles the handgun from plastic 3-D printed pieces, a few metal pins, screws and rubber bands, then test fires it with blanks.
'Freedom of armaments to all people!!' he writes in the video's description. 'A gun makes power equal!!'
It's been a full year since I watched the radical libertarian group Defense Distributed test fire the Liberator, the first fully printable gun, for the first time. Imura is one of a growing number of digital gunsmiths who saw the potential of that controversial breakthrough and have strived to improve upon the Liberator's clunky, single-shot design. Motivated by a mix of libertarianism, gun rights advocacy and open-source experimentation, their innovations include rifles, derringers, multi-round handguns and the components needed to assemble semi-automatic weapons. Dozens of other designs are waiting to be tested.
The result of all this tinkering may be the first advancements that significantly move 3-D printed firearms from the realm of science fiction to practical weapons.
'With the Liberator we were trying to communicate a kind of singularity, to create a moment,' says Cody Wilson, who founded Defense Distributed and hand-fired the first 3-D printed gun in May, 2013. 'The broad recognition of this idea seemed to flip a switch in peoples’ minds..We knew that people would make this their own.'
Even as the DIY community has refined and remixed 3-D printed guns, it's left legislators and regulators in the dust. Congressional efforts last year to place restrictions on printed, plastic weapons within the renewed Undetectable Firearms Act fell flat. That said, the legality of 3-D printing a gun in the United States remains unclear, which explains why most of the gun designers contacted by WIRED declined to comment or wished to do so anonymously.
Despite that legal ambiguity, it took only weeks for digital gunsmiths to improve upon the first fully 3-D printed gun. Defense Distributed printed the first Liberator in May, 2013, using a second-hand refrigerator-sized Stratasys 3-D printer it bought for $8,000. Later that month, a gun enthusiast in Wisconsin riffed on the Liberator to produce a working firearm for far less, using a $1,725 Lulzbot printer with less than $25 in plastic. It fired eight .38-caliber bullets without damage.
Two months later came the first fully 3-D printed rifle, built by a Canadian gunsmith identified only as Matthew. The gun, which he calls the Grizzly, fires .22-caliber bullets. In the video below, it fires three shots. Another clip, since pulled from YouTube, shows him hand-firing it 14 times. Wilson calls the Grizzly the 'best, first improvement on the Liberator.'
The Grizzly, like the Liberator, requires removing the barrel to load a new round after each shot. But less than a month after Matthew unveiled the Grizzly, another gunsmith who calls himself 'Free-D' or 'Franco' test-fired a five-shot derringer revolver he calls the Reprringer. It shoots low-power .22-caliber rounds. Though the tiny revolver isn't entirely 3-D printed–it uses 8mm metal tube inserts in each barrel and several screws–its metal components seem to allow for a far more compact design, making the the Reprringer the smallest working 3-D printed gun publicly tested.
The blueprint for that miniature six-shooter, along with dozens of other firearms, gun parts and even explosives like grenades and mortar rounds, are hosted online by FOSSCAD, the Free Open Source Software & Computer Aided Design. The group spun out of Cody Wilson's online gun printing community known as Defcad.
Most of FOSSCAD's designs haven't been publicly tested, and its loose-knit members are reluctant to reveal their identities. But one anonymous member summed up the group's motivations: 'First, I like guns,' he wrote via instant message. 'And second, I think you should be able to 3-D print virtually anything you want.'
Aside from the Reprringer, the anonymous FOSSCAD member noted another new, proven design that may be far more practical–and have far more serious implications–than fully-printed guns: a key part of a semi-automatic weapon called the lower receiver. That part, which comprises most of the body of a gun, is the most regulated element of a firearm. Print a lower receiver, and you can buy the rest of a gun's components off the shelf without an ID or waiting period.
Download fusion 360 full crack version. FOSSCAD members have printed and test fired AR-15 lower receivers, including one designed to be the lightest available, another that includes a printed stock and grip, one designed for a Czechoslovakian semi-automatic pistol called the Skorpion, and another designed for the SKS, a semi-automatic rifle that fires the same ammunition as an AK-47. The last two of those designs are test fired in the videos below.
Those partially printed semi-automatic weapons are powerful, military-grade firearms, and because their lower receivers were printed, they are largely unregulated. The FOSSCAD member who spoke to WIRED says it's only a matter of time until fully-printed guns are equally durable and deadly.
'Before the Liberator, if you would have asked someone if plastic guns were possible, they would have laughed at you,' he says. 'They aren't practical, but that doesn't mean they couldn't be. Hence the desire to improve.'
As 3-D printed guns have evolved over the past 18 months from a science-fictional experiment into a subculture, they've faced a fundamental limitation: Cheap plastic isn't the best material to contain an explosive blast. Now an amateur gunsmith has instead found a way to transfer that stress to a component that's actually made of metal—the ammunition.
Michael Crumling, a 25-year-old machinist from York, Pennsylvania, has developed a round designed specifically to be fired from 3-D printed guns. His ammunition uses a thicker steel shell with a lead bullet inserted an inch inside, deep enough that the shell can contain the explosion of the round's gunpowder instead of transferring that force to the plastic body or barrel of the gun. Crumling says that allows a home-printed firearm made from even the cheapest materials to be fired again and again without cracking or deformation. And while his design isn't easily replicated because the rounds must be individually machined for now, it may represent another step towards durable, practical, printed guns—even semi-automatic ones.
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'It’s a really simple concept: It’s kind of a barrel integrated into the shell, so to speak,' says Crumling. 'Basically it removes all the stresses and pressures from the 3-D printed parts. You should be able to fire an unlimited number of shots through the gun without replacing any parts other than the shell.'
3d Gun Bullets
Last week, for instance, Crumling shot 19 rounds from a 3-D printed gun of his own design created on an ultra-cheap $400 Printrbot printer using PLA plastic. (He concedes his gun isn't completely 3-D printed; it uses some metal screws and a AR-15 trigger and firing hammer that he bought online for a total of $30. But he argues none of those parts affected the gun's firing durability.) Though the gun misfired a few times, it didn't suffer from any noticeable internal damage after all of those explosions. Here's a time lapse video that shows 18 of those shots.
When the top of Crumling's gun shattered in an earlier test, he determined that the breakage was caused by the shell's movement, not the explosion inside of it. So in his most recent gun design, the roof of his gun's chamber is left open. That allows the shell to eject itself, as shown in the GIF below.
Combined with revolver components or some sort of auto-loading mechanism, Crumling believes his method could enable printing a semi-automatic weapon. 'That’s the main reason I developed these, and that’s the next step,' says Crumling. 'This is a building block for the future of 3-D printed firearms that will enable people to develop semiautomatic and—if you had the proper legal paperwork—even fully automatic weapons.'
New Gun Bullets
In the meantime, Crumling's ammunition could demonstrate a controversial new upgrade to the durability of even single-shot printed guns. Resident evil 0 remastered walkthrough. Law enforcement bodies around the world have responded to the threat of 3-D printed weapons by noting their unreliability. The US Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms released a video last year showing a Liberator, the first 3-D printed weapon created by the libertarian group Defense Distributed, exploding during ATF's test firing. Australia's New South Wales police commissioner Andrew Scipione held a press conference last year to warn about the guns' danger after blowing up a Liberator of its own. 'No matter what end of this gun you can be on, you could die,' he warned.
Defense Distributed has responded by arguing in each case that government officials used the wrong printing methods or the wrong caliber ammunition, perhaps intending to scare gun enthusiasts away from printable weapons. But Defense Distributed engineer John Sullivan also admits the Liberator and other plastic-barrel guns take significant damage every time they fire a conventional round. Because typical ammunition uses thin brass casing, the metal deforms and transfers the round's explosion to the gun's plastic pieces. 'That's why a printed barrel works for only say, 10 rounds,' Sullivan says. 'It just wears out.'
For now, the limiting factor to Crumling's rounds may be the difficulty of producing them. So far he's machined the ammunition, which he's named the .314 Atlas based on its .314-inch caliber and the 1920s Atlas lathe he uses to make it, shell by shell. The process takes a painstaking 60 minutes per round. But the raw materials cost only 27 cents each, he says. And once the shells are produced they can be fired, then repacked with new bullets, gunpowder and primer to be shot again.
Crumling's steel-shelled rounds seem to control their explosions well enough to protect printed guns created with even the very cheapest printing techniques. 'This guy has refined 3D printed firearms such that they can be reliably printed on very low end 3-D printers,' says Sullivan. 'It’s so brilliantly simple. I love it.'
3d Printed Gun Bullets
Despite the gun control firestorm associated with 3-D printed weapons, Crumling says he's not particularly interested in his invention as a political provocation as much as an engineering accomplishment he wanted to share with the gun community. 'I'm not an activist. I’m more of a challenge-oriented person,' he says. 'This posed a challenge and that’s much more interesting to me than any political motivation.'
That hasn't prevented him from taking some legal precautions. His test weapon contains a chunk of metal to make it legal under the Undetectable Firearms Act and has a rifled bore to comply with the National Firearms Act. Manufacturing your own ammunition is legal in the U.S., though selling it requires a Federal Firearms License. Crumling says he doesn't plan to sell his Atlas rounds, though he's sharing designs for the ammunition on his website. He adds that he could change his mind if enough gun enthusiasts ask to buy the rounds, in which case he'll apply for the necessary license.
Until then, Crumling's 3-D printing-friendly ammo will serve as a proof-of-concept—and a reminder: If gun control advocates are taking comfort in printed weapons' impracticality, that comfort gets a little colder with every upgrade.