5 ms·

People love these 3D printed gun stories... but they don't realize that a drill press and a metal file are really all you need, and they make a better gun too..

• jacquesm 11y ago
  I think one of the reasons is that using a drill press and a metal file require some skill whereas it takes much less skill to download a design and hit 'print'. Even so the quality of low cost 3D printer printed objects is such that you'll definitely need that file (and maybe even that drill press) so from that point of view not much has been gained. Substituting plastic for metal in a gun is a great way to lose a couple of fingers or an eyeball too.
  • nickpinkston 11y ago
    Yea, totally, but this all assumes you can get ammo too. That's way harder than making a gun. Maybe a 3D printed taser would actually be more accessible?
    • duncan_bayne 11y ago
      Given the amount of energy in a typical smartphone battery, I've wondered about making some sort of replacement back, loaded with supercapacitors and a couple of contacts, so the entire phone could double as a stun-gun ...
      • jacquesm 11y ago
        With a little bit of creative re-wiring it might even double as a grenade.
        • duncan_bayne 11y ago
          Hah! My wife owns one of the Samsung S3s with the 'swelling battery' problem; those things are almost grenades out of the box :)
          • jacquesm 11y ago
            People really underestimate the potency of a cell phone battery. It always makes me laugh how the airline security check will confiscate bottles with baby milk and water but lets through a couple of hundred high energy batteries without a problem (laptops, cellphones, tablets). Now what could a creative terrorist do with a few phone batteries and some wire. Might even be enough to burn through the cockpit door of an airliner.
            • duncan_bayne 11y ago
              I don't know about that, but you could probably make some sort of thermite-phone, with a flammable body ignited by the energy in the battery. If done carefully, you could possibly have the thing behave like a fully functional phone until ignited. Doubt it'd bring down an airliner but it'd cause no end of panic and chaos onboard.
              • jacquesm 11y ago
                Being somewhat practical oriented I've half a mind to try to see what kind of a 'bang' one could get out of a cellphone or laptop battery but I have two worries: the first that it will succeed, the second that it will succeed a bit too well resulting in people no longer being allowed to bring laptops and cellphones on board of airliners and I have enough enemies as it is ;) It's strange that nobody tried this to date (or at least, I can't find any hard evidence about people trying to blow stuff up with cell phone or laptop batteries).
                • duncan_bayne 11y ago
                  A fully charged 1000mAH 3.7V battery contains ~ 13kJ of energy. One gram of TNT gives you ~4kJ. So at best - assuming you had some way of efficiently exploding a smartphone battery - you'd get a couple grams of TNT yield. I suspect shocking, burning or smoking would be a better route to weaponising a smartphone. Edited: for comparison, the muzzle energy for a .50BMG round is ~15Kj. Bearing in mind you get ~4kJ from a gram of TNT, this explains why being shot hurts so much :)
  • ams6110 11y ago
    We used to teach middle schoolers to use such tools. It was a class called "shop" or maybe "industrial arts." Who ever thought they might be used to make a gun. Oh wait -- that was the project of one of the kids in my shop class, ca. 1979.
    • jacquesm 11y ago
      Yep. All knowledge is 'dual use', and metal working skills more so than most.
• shpx 11y ago
  The guy who made this gun also made a pistol out of metal https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvqIgnclZTg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvqIgnclZTg