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3D printing can produce a whole helluvalot of cool things, but at the end of the day, it’s just plastic. Guns are not meant to be made of plastic. If you make them of plastic, they break. And then the gun explodes in your face, leading to a rather complicated explanation at the hospital as to how you got plastic embedded in your forehead.
The ambitious 3-D printing gunsmiths behind the Wiki Weapons project created the lower receiver (the bit of the gun that holds most of the important moving parts) of an AR-15 carbine out of plastic, and then bolted it onto an otherwise perfectly functional rifle. They didn’t expect it to work. In the words of the project leader, “we knew it would break”.
So, armed with the knowledge that they were playing with a ridiculously unsafe firearm, how did they choose to test it? In a Mythbusters-style bunker, cowering behind protective screens? No, they did what any self-respecting plastic-gun-maker does and went down to the range and shot it. Not even any safety glasses. Unsurprisingly, the plastic gun broke in half after just 6 shots — they’re just lucky that they escaped with their eyesight intact.
Has this deterred our intrepid wannabe engineers? Not even slightly. They say they’re gonna be back, with a new and improved design, so make sure you steer clear of . On the upside, we might get a good new entry for this year’s Darwin Awards. [Defence Distributed via Wired]
Hell. No.
No
Negative
Nah!
Might be wrong here but weren’t the early M16 rifles used during the Vietnam war originally made out of plastic?
i think a lot of them are kevlar. a bit stronger than plastic.
You’re right. The plastic they use for printing is normally weak, whereas the plastic on existing M16s (Yes, plastic still used today!) is a tougher derivative, or even Kevlar. But yes, plastic.
Thanks guys – good to know I learned something from reading comics and didn’t waste my youth…well…
Just remember that neither this video, nor the M16 use plastic for the important bit – the barrel.
OMG you guys don’t how the first thing about stuff but still spout off like you know everything.
No the M16 was not made out of plastic. It’s furniture was made out of plastic, i.e. the pistol grip, hand guards etc. The receiver, i.e. the part that is considered a fire arm was made out of aircraft grade aluminum, all of these things were considered new for a military firearm.
For Christ sake, if you don’t know what you’re talking about, please don’t comment.
Damnit, beat me to it. No the M-16 at its functioning core was not made out of plastic, just the parts that were meant to be in contact with skin, like the barrel guards and such… The rifle itself was very much made of metal.
yes?
Yes, Plastic can be stronger then metal, you just have to change the design a bit.
Not the plastic that works in a plastic printer. It’s by design (thermosetting) rather weak.
Depends who I’m shooting at.
This was the plot line of last weeks CSI. The gun could only be shot once, and if many were made form the same printer, they would all have the same imperfection meaning they couldn’t be traced.
Then again, it was just a tv show.
Guns like this already exist, with a gun with a ceramic barell and bullets with ceramic slugs in plastic coats, you can get a gun like that pass a metal detector, you may get only 6 shots but that plenty to kill 1 or 2 people.
Ah the Glock 7! It costs more than you make in a month!
No confirmation of these actually existing.
It’s a Die Hard reference, it doesn’t actually exist.
I got it, cheers
. That was my point.
It’s only the lower receiver that is made from plastic, in the US the lower receiver is considered the firearm.
The lower receiver on a AR15 isn’t stressed much and as such there are already lots of AR15′s that have lower receivers made from plastic.
So to answer your question, yes I would be perfectly happy to fire a AR15 with a printed lower receiver.
All the plastic comments on 3D printing – you do know that you can print in metal don’t you?