Industrial 3D printers

[Voodoochild]

I wonder if there are in companies in the Gun Industry that are or have thought about using 3D printing to print out parts. I mean start with the small things at first and then move up to bigger and bigger parts.

[trackmagic]

I wonder if there are in companies in the Gun Industry that are or have thought about using 3D printing to print out parts. I mean start with the small things at first and then move up to bigger and bigger parts.

Currently, most 3D printers print plastic parts and would be pretty good for making things like stocks and grips. In general 3D printers are better for prototyping work (they used to be called "Rapid Prototype Machines" actually). For production it is normally cheaper to mold plastics than to print them.

There are some new machines on the market that sinter metals. The 2 I know of are called Phenix and EOS.

[SilverBullet432]

I wonder if there are in companies in the Gun Industry that are or have thought about using 3D printing to print out parts. I mean start with the small things at first and then move up to bigger and bigger parts.


They do, a CNC lathe :jester: 3D printers print plastic parts.

[FromMyColdDeadHand]

Ron Silvers is pretty active in the 3D printing community. He talks about how they have been used in suppressor manufacturing for awhile, IIRC.

I recently printed out a piece for my Surefire EB2 flashlight. Love the light, but the button was exposed and get activated from time to time. I designed a shroud that keeps it from being pushed in inadvertantly.

I still want to print a polymer replacement grip for my HK P7....

[Honu]

will be curious what the future of printing brings

http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/16/technology/3d-printed-bridge/

[SilverBullet432]

Humans need not apply:sarcastic:

[KalashniKEV]

I have access to a pretty good one at work, but I don't think I'd be interested in printing anything firearms related that I'd actually use more than once.

If I did, I'd work it up in CAD, 3D print a model, and if it looks good, use a CNC mill to cut the inverse into an injection mold.

Then I'd be cranking out hundreds of said widget, at pennies on the dollar, literally 200x faster.

[1_click_off]

There was a guy printing his own lowers. He did it more as a "piss on the man" reason, but they stayed alive for about 10 rounds. He has his story on YouTube. I will see if I can dig it up.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DconsfGsXyA


And this is cool

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u7ZYKMBDm4M

[FromMyColdDeadHand]

I have access to a pretty good one at work, but I don't think I'd be interested in printing anything firearms related that I'd actually use more than once.

If I did, I'd work it up in CAD, 3D print a model, and if it looks good, use a CNC mill to cut the inverse into an injection mold.

Then I'd be cranking out hundreds of said widget, at pennies on the dollar, literally 200x faster.

What machine and material does it work in?

The thing is people need to get out of the 'horseless carriage' mentality. Additive Manufacturing (AM) makes it so that you can make things in ways that simply can't be done any other way- and do it one at a time, or with parallel printers- make a bunch. It really takes a mind shift from "can I make this thing I used to CNC, injection mold, blow mold, roto mold" to getting back to what need are you actually trying to meet and engineering a new solution based on the strengths of AM and not its limitations.

Make cars, not 'horseless carriages'.

You can also print items in things like PLA and do investments casting or lost wax methods to make metal versions.

To me, 3D printing is stagnating right now. I have two printers at home and I'd say that at the sub $5k level, nothing has really fundamentally changed in the last 24 months. ABS and PLA plastics, at 0.2mm layers on 275x275x275mm platforms. They've gotten heated beds more common and the machines are prettier- but the functionality isn't much better. Dual heads are more common, but that exposes the real limitation I have with home 3D printers- the software that 'slices' the models into layers. It is inherently complex operation and I find that they all have their quirks.

That, and I am a CAD caveman. I use Tinkercad because I can only really think in boxes and minus boxes.

My wife can't get our 2D Epson picture printer to work half the time, there is no way that 3D printing is going to get to be prevalent at home. I consider my printers to be more of an offset to my grandfathers 'ShopSmith" machine that was a lathe-tablesaw-drillpress-bandsaw all-in-one for making things.

There are more and higher-performance materials to use. Nylons and PETs, Taulman is doing great things at for the at-home users.

I'm really looking for laser sintered metals and plastics- but I'm not sure if the lasers can ever get cheap enough.

My little daughter call my printers the "robot glue guns". She loves the 'jewelery' that I print out of PET resin- especially because I can make it with her name in it.

[Honu]

i think its going to be like this (good post) till they do adv some more and offer a real reason to have them ?
have heard rumors of some things like buying a product and build it on spot at some places say car parts that could be needed and not have to stock them just have access to the plans
like home computers that really were quite cool but had limited use at homes for some time until the communication we rely on now came into play most dont need them they can now get away with a tablet even

it will be interesting how they develop more for sure :)



What machine and material does it work in?

The thing is people need to get out of the 'horseless carriage' mentality. Additive Manufacturing (AM) makes it so that you can make things in ways that simply can't be done any other way- and do it one at a time, or with parallel printers- make a bunch. It really takes a mind shift from "can I make this thing I used to CNC, injection mold, blow mold, roto mold" to getting back to what need are you actually trying to meet and engineering a new solution based on the strengths of AM and not its limitations.

Make cars, not 'horseless carriages'.

You can also print items in things like PLA and do investments casting or lost wax methods to make metal versions.

To me, 3D printing is stagnating right now. I have two printers at home and I'd say that at the sub $5k level, nothing has really fundamentally changed in the last 24 months. ABS and PLA plastics, at 0.2mm layers on 275x275x275mm platforms. They've gotten heated beds more common and the machines are prettier- but the functionality isn't much better. Dual heads are more common, but that exposes the real limitation I have with home 3D printers- the software that 'slices' the models into layers. It is inherently complex operation and I find that they all have their quirks.

That, and I am a CAD caveman. I use Tinkercad because I can only really think in boxes and minus boxes.

My wife can't get our 2D Epson picture printer to work half the time, there is no way that 3D printing is going to get to be prevalent at home. I consider my printers to be more of an offset to my grandfathers 'ShopSmith" machine that was a lathe-tablesaw-drillpress-bandsaw all-in-one for making things.

There are more and higher-performance materials to use. Nylons and PETs, Taulman is doing great things at for the at-home users.

I'm really looking for laser sintered metals and plastics- but I'm not sure if the lasers can ever get cheap enough.

My little daughter call my printers the "robot glue guns". She loves the 'jewelery' that I print out of PET resin- especially because I can make it with her name in it.

[Crow Hunter]

I wonder if there are in companies in the Gun Industry that are or have thought about using 3D printing to print out parts. I mean start with the small things at first and then move up to bigger and bigger parts.

The problem, at least in my experience, is the materials used are not very durable. You can sometimes surface treat them with superglue to "case harden" them and make strengthen them up some but they still don't handle tensile loading well at all. Compression they are okay. The sintered metal parts are very similar. They don't work well under tensile loads or bending loads.

I use ours (Makerbot and a Uprint) to make prototypes of ideas before we commit to purchasing tooling/dies. Another guy here has used it to make molding dies for 1 off rubber/gasket parts.

Even if we could get to the point that we could make identically durable/performing parts from 3D printing that we can from more traditional equipment it still it takes quite a bit of time for each part to be produced. To get the economy of scale needed to produce parts at a decent takt time you are going to have to have A LOT of machines. For that cost, you usually could buy a piece of equipment to mold/mill/turn the part at a much, much, much higher rate and have a superior $/part. So for making millions of say Glock 19 mag followers, 3D printing probably isn't the best choice.

The big advantage of the 3D printing would be during changeovers and extremely complex geometry parts. If you could get identical parts and all you had to do was change the model, the 3D printing would be superior if you were running lots and lots of different complicated widgets. Changing over more traditional manufacturing equipment can be significantly more time consuming and expensive.

[pinzgauer]

In the early days of my career laser printers cost over $100k and were finicky. Similar comments were made about them as the posts above. The other printers, Dot matrix and Daisy wheel printers used 100 year old typewriter tech.

Then Canon and HP had a breakthrough that dropped the price down and reliability/utility up. Same for HP and inkjet technology, with Canon joining later. The first LaserJet was $5k, and outperformed the $100k units. It changed everything we know about printing. That functionality is now essentially free, or close to it. Just pay for supplies.

We are in the finicky and limited utility phase now of 3d printing. HP is working to industrialize the technology, and signs are it will be successful.

I would not make assumptions about 3d printing based on hobby devices.