Modified Liberator 3D printed gun made with cheap printer, fires 9 shots
Joe, an engineer from Wisconsin, modified the (now censored) designs for
Defense Distributed's 3D printed gun, the Liberator, and printed a
working model on a Lulzbot A0-101, a $1,725 consumer printer that is
much cheaper and more widely available than the Stratasys Dimension SST
printer used by Defense Distributed.
The gun printed by Joe, which he’s nicknamed the “Lulz Liberator,” was
printed over 48 hours with just $25 of plastic on a desktop machine
affordable to many consumers, and was fired far more times. “People
think this takes an $8,000 machine and that it blows up on the first
shot. I want to dispel that,” says Joe. “This does work, and I want that
to be known.”
Eight of Joe’s test-fires were performed using a single barrel before
swapping it out for a new one on the ninth. After all those shots, the
weapon’s main components remained intact–even the spiraled rifling
inside of the barrel’s bore. “The only reason we stopped firing is
because the sun went down,” he says....
...Still, Joe’s cheap homemade gun isn’t without its bugs. Over the
course of its test firing, Joe and Guslick say it misfired several
times, and some of its screws and its firing pin had to be replaced.
After each firing, the ammo cartridges expanded enough that they had to
be pounded out with a hammer. “Other than that, it’s pretty much
confirming that yes, Defense Distributed is correct that this
functions,” says Guslick. “And it’s possible to make one on a much lower
cost printer.”
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