Ghost Guns - There's Good and Bad in everything Mankind creates.

[old man emu]

I'm posting this without wanting to fuel the "Guns/No Guns" debate, nor to add to the many "only in America" examples. I'm posting it as a peek into the future of personal manufacturing and to be amazed at where we have come with 3D printing since about 2010. I bought a 3D printer back in 2013 and played with a bit, but mostly unsatisfactorily. I've still got it and will eventually pull it out of storage and set it up, or use it as a template to build a better one. But that's not why I'm writing this.

 

Back in the day, home users were printing simple things like Yoda statues and sometimes hard to get replacement parts for domestic tools. Often the ideal use for a 3D printer was prototyping a design before sending the CAD files to the toolmakers. Others used the technology to create three dimensional works of Art. It is that artistic creativity that the following video explores in one area: 3D-printed firearms. This video is a pretty even-handed expose of the current state of the Art in the USA. Apart from showing the results of projects, it also gives a nod to the dilemma the US lawmakers face with the whole firearms question. 

 

We should be thankful that the culture of Australia is propelled by beer and not gunpowder.

 

So, open your mind and watch this video. Try to concentrate of the technology.

 

 

[facthunter]

You can't print high tensile steel.    Nev

[willedoo]

An interesting video. These days they have made a lot of advances in plastics and resins, so strength would be improving. With the featured 3D printed Glock, they are only printing the frame/receiver (the part that normally has the maker's serial number) and then adding a kit of mainly metal parts + soft grips. There's not a lot of load on the frame; the main issue would be hardness to resist wear of the rails by the metal slide action. It would have a shorter service life than a metal frame, but I suppose it would be just a matter of printing a new frame when it wears excessively.

 

The initial jamming problem would be a matter of tolerances. Either the printed frame had a slight warp or the initial slide's tolerances were too tight for the printed frame. The second slide obviously was machined with a slightly larger tolerance than the first. The way I see it, smaller tolerances = higher accuracy, less reliability. Larger tolerances = less accuracy, more reliability. An example of the latter would be the Owen gun and the AK-47. Drop them in the mud, give them a good shake and they're good to go. S/A slides are not always interchangeable. For example, a slide from a WW1/WW2 standard GI issue Colt 1911 might have no trouble fitting on a tighter machined accuratised modern target version like a Colt Gold Cup, but it wouldn't work the other way round.

 

As a side note, probably stating the obvious, but the competition match they were shooting appeared to be an IPSC type match and they are not shooting at the picture of the lady, She's the hostage and the other targets are the baddies. They get a match penalty if they accidentally shoot the hostage. I can see the printer bloke's reasoning on who would go to all the trouble of printing one. Given the price of the kit mentioned, a crook would get a real one on the black market for the same price or not much more.

[willedoo]

At the end of the video - I wonder what the owners of the gun range would think of them melting plastic all over their concrete floor. A friend of mine has a cheap 3D printer he uses to make model railway bits and pieces. It seems to take a long time to print; I wonder if the speed of printing will eventually improve.

 

I once read about a mob in Australia 3D printing body parts and things for the medical industry. There was a girl in her twenties who had been in a wheelchair for some time, and the off the shelf replacement vertebrae implants were one size fits all and not suitable for her physiology. The Australian company custom built her a replacement vertebrae section and she was able to get out of the wheelchair and live a normal life.

[facthunter]

The bolt breach and barrell all need to be of high strength alloy steel.. For rifling to  work, the fit has to be very accurate. There'd be a fair chance of the thing blowing up in your face. The lighter the Pistol is the more kick back. Nev

[willedoo]

3 minutes ago, facthunter said:

The bolt breach and barrell all need to be of high strength alloy steel.. For rifling to  work, the fit has to be very accurate. There'd be a fair chance of the thing blowing up in your face. The lighter the Pistol is the more kick back. Nev

Agreed Nev, but as far as recoil goes,  the metal receiver/frame on a semi-auto pistol makes up very little of the overall weight and would only be a few grams more than a resin one. ome would know, but I think the Glocks in question have a lot of plastic content to start with.

 

I see toward the end of the video where the video host is showing photos of the match on the phone, he made the comment that one of the guns was completely home made, including the metal parts. As far as rifling goes, it would be very hard for a home builder to do. Maybe the gun was a smooth bore to fire a small .410 shotgun shell.

[facthunter]

What for ? Shooting rabbits in a cage?   Nev

[old man emu]

4 hours ago, willedoo said:

the metal receiver/frame on a semi-auto pistol makes up very little of the overall weight and would only be a few grams more than a resin one. ome would know,

I'm no gun expert, even after having been trained on and issued with a Glock. All the outside bits of a Glock are some sort of polymer while the bits that hold in the bang are all metal. Don't forget that you can strip all the wood off a .22 and it will still fire as accurately as you can hold it.

 

I suppose it's the same in the other States of Aus, but in NSW any part of a firearm is a firearm, subject to licensing of the holder and registering of the item. So doing making one in NSW would be a No-No. As Willedoo said, for real criminal work a firearm from a recognised manufacturer is not hard to get. What these blokes are doing is making firearms more for the look of them than the practicality. I bet all of them have cupboards full of S&W's, Remington, Mauser etc. People already make fantasy designed firearms for COSplay. I was even going to make one of these: out of EVA foam for my grandson. 

 

5 hours ago, willedoo said:

I wonder if the speed of printing will eventually improve.

Unfortunately not. The speed of printing is dependent on the complexity of the object's outer appearance but more so on the internal fill required to give the object its strength. Another factor is the rate of cooling of the print media. It has to cool and set before too many layers are added on top, otherwise it will slump. That's why 3D printing will never suit the immediate needs of a McGyver.

[willedoo]

The part that has me curious is the strength of the finished product. I suppose there's a variety of compounds available to print with.

[old man emu]

7 hours ago, willedoo said:

I suppose there's a variety of compounds available to print with

That is where the research is going. Initially 3D printers used "plastics" of various kinds. Leaving aside the mechanics of a 3D printer, all that was required to put down a layer was for the solid source material to be softened by heat so that it could be extruded through a nozzle which was moved about my the mechanical bits of the printer. Then the heated material had to cool quickly but evenly to create a layer, overwhich subsequent layers were put down to create stacked "images". The whole 3D printing concept was a follow on from simple document printing on paper with the addition of controlled movement in the vertical direction.

 

Over the years many types of source material have been examined, mainly to achieve an end product that is strong enough to replace traditional iron or clay. A real breakthrough in this time of concern about natural resources used in housing is the enlargement of the 3-D machines coupled with their ability to use cement-like material instead of timber.

https://www.savings.com.au/home-loans/3d-house-printing-explained

[onetrack]

The bottom line is, the single greatest problem with nearly all the males in American society is their total fixation and worship of firearms, which is even enshrined in their Constitution. And it's probably taught to them in their schools, too.

At the end of the day, you construct and carry a firearm simply because you want to kill something or someone. There must be some major pyschological dysfunction in American society, that such a huge number of them are so totally obsessed with fondling firearms and killing other people.

 

The local Police have just nailed an 18 yr old who was having a wonderful time manufacturing a whole pile of 3D-printed firearms. No doubt he had many repeat orders from the bikies. He'd better have a good lawyer.

 

My stepdaughters boyfriend is an armourer, and he constantly receives large numbers of requests to modify firearms, shorten them, manufacture silencers, and carry out automatic conversions - all with no official approval or notification to the authorities, of course.

He turns them all down - not only because so many of the requests are "third party" requests, or requests from dubious individuals he hardly knows - but also because he says it simply not worth losing his armourers licence, even despite the relatively large amounts he's offered to do the work "under the counter".

[old man emu]

If you were wondering about the metal parts for these 3D printed creations, here's a video showing the availability of firearm parts from retailers in the USA. The topic of the video is the assembly of a firearm from a pile of parts purchased from a supplier. Even if you detest firearms, the video is interesting just to see how a modern firearm is assembled from its components. Apparently in the USA it is only the Fire Control Unit (FCU), or as we call it, the trigger assembly, that constitutes a firearm, whereas as firearms laws are written here, every component is a "firearm". 

 

Did I ever post anything about gun-like things that accelerate a projectile through the application of magnetism?

 

[facthunter]

So far it's your Magnetic personality we get to  see. Fire away.. Nev

[old man emu]

The video I'm posting here is about the 2nd generation design of one company's coil gun. Development has been quite rapid. The 1st generation was exhibited in February 2022, and the 2nd in August 2022.  As the presenter says early on, development to give coil gun projectiles similar velocities to "gunpowder" guns is the key to coil guns becoming real world practical. The video shows the thing being used on a range. Muzzle velocity is around 70 fps, which is about one fortieth of the muzzle velocity of a hunting rifle bullet as shown in this chart. 70 fps is 21m/s or 75 kph. That projectile could do some significant hurt.

 

Enjoy the video. I've said before that this bloke is not a red-necked nut. His research into firearms is always very good, and by his cheesy grin you can tell he likes to play with rare firearms.

 

[Old Koreelah]

Interesting. Not very effective, but it’s early days for that technology. 

This video didn’t refresh my waning interest in firearms. Most of the American shooting vids I’ve watched reinforce the stark differences between their culture and Australia’s: so many are obsessed with pumping lots of ammo into a human targets. 

[old man emu]

3 hours ago, Old Koreelah said:

Most of the American shooting vids I’ve watched reinforce the stark differences

Quite agree. That's why I always watch this bloke's videos. If he goes to the range, it's to investigate the functionality of a gun he has researched and presented a video from that research.

 

I disagree with your opinion that a coil gun would be ineffective. When I read your comment, my mind immediately went to such a device's value to police in Australia. I emphasise the location simply because most of the recent instances of the use of deadly force by Australian police have involved an offender who is not armed with a firearm. It's usually a bladed weapon, or, for the traditionalist, a lump of four-be-two.  I think a low-energy small projectile would definitely gain the attention of anyone hit by it.

 

Consider "copping one in the nuts" with a cricket ball. Brings tears to your eyes - and other things. A cricket ball weighs 0.156 kg. A good park cricketer can propel a cricket ball at 120 kph (33 m/s). That gives it a Force of of 85 Newtons. Which is enough to push an 85 kg weight a distance of one metre. Say your coil gun propelled a 50 gm projectile at 21 m/s, giving it a force of 11 Newtons. Not as much as a cricket ball, but the projectile has a much smaller contact area, so the transfer of energy on hitting a person would hurt a lot.

 

Given that the coil gun as exhibited here is a multiple discharge device, a constable could inflict multiple points of pain very quickly, thereby distracting the target from its original idea of attacking the constable. Also, the initial energy would dissipate quickly, thereby reducing the chances of serious collateral injury to bystanders. Most police shooting incidents involve close range - 10 to 15 metres. If the offender is armed with a firearm, then the wise thing for the constable to do is  retreat to a place of safety and call in the specialists. 

 

Having observed the rise in police use of deadly force over the past fifteen years, compared to my near thirty years prior to that, I'm all for reducing the access of non-specialist police to deadly force. Tasers and pepper spray can prove fatal if the target is not in the best of health, and pepper spray can blow back on the user, putting them at risk of injury from an offender. The coil gun has the advantage of the constable carrying an authoritative weapon, but one which has a very low probability of inflicting deadly force, or of disabling the constable through secondary contamination.

 

 

[Marty_d]

They already have guns that fire rubber bullets, but they've been proven to inflict terrible injuries when used for crowd control.  They already have bean bag guns too.

Whatever the projecting force, I reckon a semi-soft, relatively slow but weighty option like the bean bag would be a lot safer than a small solid projectile - think of eye injuries.

In terms of the future of railguns, I've heard that the Chinese are experimenting with ship-borne guns - you need a motza of electricity for the magnets.  Ultimate aim is to deliver a solid (tungsten probably) round at hypersonic velocities, which means there is zero defense against it.  The pure speed of the solid round would have a greater effect than an explosive round.

[willedoo]

12 minutes ago, Marty_d said:

The pure speed of the solid round would have a greater effect than an explosive round.

I think they use the term kinetic.

[old man emu]

4 minutes ago, Marty_d said:

They already have guns that fire rubber bullets, but they've been proven to inflict terrible injuries when used for crowd control.  They already have bean bag guns too.

Those projectiles are fired from long arm (shot guns) which are not the personal carry weapon of a street cop. As a 'horses for courses" use, rubber bullets and bean bags are for riot control and are employed by specialist units. What a street cop needs is a replacement for the very (relatively) powerful gas expansion thing that we are used to.

 

This next video gives a better demonstration of the technology and proposes that what is shown here is simply a beginning.