12/5/12
3-D Printed Gun Only Lasts 6 Shots | Danger Room | Wired.com
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3D Printed Gun Only Lasts 6 Shots By Robert Beckhusen 12.03.12 4:35 PM Follow @rbeckhusen
A group of 3D printing gunsmiths have taken another step toward making a gun you can download off the internet. This weekend, the desktop weaponeers took a partially printed rifle out to test how long its plastic parts survived spewing bullets. The result? Six rounds until it snapped apart. But that was also the point, the group’s founder tells Danger Room. “We knew it would break, probably,” says Cody Wilson, who heads the Wiki Weapon project. “But I don’t think we thought it’d break within six [rounds]. We thought it’d break within 20.” It’s the first live testing done by Wilson and Defense Distributed, the online collective that aims not only produce the world’s first fully 3D printed gun, or “Wiki Weapon,” but create a clearinghouse for sharing weapons blueprints over the internet. But until these early prototypes can fire more than a few rounds without breaking, they have to be tested. The pressure from firing rapidfire rounds is still too strong, though slowly firing single shots has apparently been demonstrated to last longer. The gun tested this weekend was not fully 3D printed, only partially. The only printed part was the lower receiver — or the gun’s trigger and grip — for an AR15 rifle completed with offthe shelf metal parts, which was first developed by Wisconsinbased engineer and hobbyist Michael Guslick. And the design works, technically, but is still far inferior to a standard rifle. But Wilson learned a few things about how to improve it. For this weekend’s test, Wilson’s best guess is that the force of recoil destroyed part of the plastic lower receiver, causing it to come unhinged. Wilson first fired one round to see if the gun worked, and then handed it to another member of the group. With 10 rounds in the magazine, the shooter managed to unload five. The recoil “pushes the ring back and down,” Wilson says, referring to the oshaped ring attached to the gun’s upper receiver — which cycles the bullet — and shoulder stock, creating tremendous stresses. One potential solution is reinforcing the oring, which the group detailed in a blog post. This might be done by just making it thicker, with more plastic material added to the ring’s sides where it won’t interfere with other components. The group also wants to reshape the trigger guard, boost the strength of interior pins and bolt bosses, and include custom markings — such as whether the gun is in the “safe” position — along with the printed product instead of laser printing the markings afterward. “We’ve been talking about this for months, so this is just a way of releasing some steam and doing something fun,” Wilson says. “We’ve been really heavy on the talking side of things, but we really just want to do things, you know?” For weeks, they haven’t been able to even start. In September, Wilson leased a 3D printer from additive manufacturing firm Stratasys that he planned to use to make the weapon. But it didn’t
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