Transcript:
Hey, what’s up, nerdgasm pants? Jerry, here, AKA. Barnacle YZ. Now The most requested thing that I get out of everything I 3d print. Is 3d print a gun 3d print, a gun, which a 3d print a gun? Come on, you three pretty good, all right well. I thought the media beat this one to death Guys, quite frankly, but you know what we’re gonna go ahead and print an ar-15 lower just to see if all this talk about 3d printing, A gun is a real possibility, Because I guess we’ll never know unless we try. Don’t worry, it’s empty well, guys. This video has been a long time coming. You guys have been asking me to print a gun since I got my first 3d printer and I kept saying no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, but today. I’m saying yes, so this guy right here is my MP. 15 by Smith & Wesson, It’s a two to three caliber ar-15 rifle, not assault rifle. Everybody loves throwing the term assault rifle out there. Nope, this is a sports rifle. It’s semi-automatic. It looks threatening as hell. Realistically, it shoots these itty bitty little bullets that you know. Granted, they can punch holster steel at 200 yards and they’re deadly accurate, but seriously, you don’t want a rifle. That’s not accurate so since all the talk on the internet and in the media seems to be around the ar-15 assault rifle. I figured that it would be fitting for us to print the lower receiver because all the media could talk about was how you can 3d print this gun. No, [ __ ]! You cannot 3d print this gun. You can print the least significant part of this gun. Do you need this? Yeah, pretty much. Do you need this part? Oh yeah. II need a barrel, yeah? I’m gonna say pry barrels Probably most important hell. I could shoot the t23 ammo, just hitting it with a hammer If I had a barrel, but the lower it’s important, but it’s not that important, but since I’m done mocking the media Now anyways, the model that we’re gonna be printing is from defense distributed. You remember those guys? They were the ones that kind of got in the media’s eye for being able to print things such as The Liberator pistol, which was the all plastic pistol that you could sneak onto airplanes and stuff that just so happened to have metal parts inside of it because it wasn’t all plastic. But anyways, you do have to admit if you could print a lower receiver. That’s actual a big step in that direction, because then what’s stopping you from printing An upper receiver well? I’ll tell you plastic isn’t durable enough to be the upper receiver. It just isn’t. It can’t stand up to the heat. At least the 3d printed. Plastic can well talk is cheap. Let’s take one of my 3d printers. We’re gonna take the Ultimaker v2 Because that’s my strongest 3d printer and we’re gonna go ahead and print out an ar-15 lower and we’re gonna use the defense distributed model that has been featured in all the videos where the guy prints it and takes it out and actually shoots it. I’m not gonna do that. Trust me. After this, you’re not gonna want to do it either, but it’s still a cool exercise, and it’s still something cool to try. So let’s get to it, okay, guys, so the first thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna open up Kuroh. Which is my software slicer that I use for taking the 3d model and turning it into several layers. If you haven’t seen my other 3d printing videos fundamentally the way these 3d printer works at least the desktop versions, They basically print a layer at a time, so a slicer essentially takes a three-dimensional item like this and cuts it into several thousand layers that when laid on top of each other and fused together form a 3d object now for for this object. I’m not going to print it in an incredibly high resolution because this thing can take up to 36 hours to print, so we’re gonna go ahead and just print it at the standard point to layer height, and we’re gonna do a hundred percent infill and basically what that’s going to do is produce a printout that is 100% solid plastic now. I am going to use support material because there’s tons of overhangs. You can see in all these little areas that we’re gonna want some scaffolding material in place to hold that up, all right. Well, let’s get this over to the 3d print fired up. Alright, guys, here’s my first attempt at printing the ar-15 lower and you can see. I already removed a ton of the support material, but you can see the support material Got so stubborn. I literally can’t. Remove it from the model Now. If I took a dremel to this for hours and hours and hours, I’d be able to clean all these holes up and clean all this material out and this would be a completely usable model. You can see in here where it didn’t need any support material. It’s very, very clean. Everything’s very smooth like it should be, so this would be a good example of a usable. Ar lower If you took the time to clean it up, but to be honest, I don’t have hours and hours and hours and hours to refine this. So instead we’re gonna try printing one without support material and see if it comes out any better. Well, guys, then you’ll have to say. I’m shocked. It actually came out a lot better if you look here. The underside is rough right here where there was a really really harsh overhang. You can see some stringing on the material, But overall it’s not bad. This would all be really easy to clean up, and if I wanted to. I could even use like a plastic polymer or something like that and fill it in and sand it and it would be fine, but all the holes you can see are very, very clean inside and out they’re all very very round. Everything’s where it’s supposed to be, so I would have to say this is representative of a very successful print. Now you can tweak with the settings and use different types of material this material just so happens to be straight. Pla, nothing super fancy you could print this in. ABS, also and the ABS would be a little bit more flexible and durable, but honestly, the PLA is a good option, so as a part of this video, I’m not going to install the gun parts into this, because honestly, they’re not going to fit without a lot of modification, which lends to my point. You really can’t just 3d print a lower and just build a gun out of it. I mean there. There is a lot of craftsmanship that has to go and use this now. One thing that the media seems to always talk about is how anybody can just take a desktop 3d printer and print one of these well. I just did it right, so anybody could. Well, here’s the problem, guys. I’m going to show you here. I have a standard two to three magazines for an ar-15 right. There’s nothing special about it’s standard. I’m gonna take it on them. Try to put it in there. Yeah, yeah, well, you can see. I mean, everything lines up. Why isn’t the magazine just going in there? Oh, god, it’s in there. Well, at least. I got my magazine back so it doesn’t slide in there. You can see it’s got material all over it from the magazine. It doesn’t slide in there. Well, let me tell you something about 3d printing. Abs shrinks a huge amount when you print it. PLA shrinks a little bit of an amount. That’s why I think it’s a good material for this because it probably shrinks less than any other material that I’ve used and you can still see that the tolerances are so tight on a firearm. It just doesn’t fit. I would have to sand and sand and grind and grind and sand and then these are all these little holes and stuff. They’re not gonna line up absolutely flawlessly either, which is gonna cause binding inside the gun now, guys! I’ll be honest you can adjust the scaling of this to add slightly a little bit more scale to it. When you print it, you can play around with the size and dimensions to combat the shrinkage and eventually you should get to a part that meets the tolerances where this would probably snap right in and everything would align, but that would take a lot of trial and error now in the videos that you’ve seen or defense distributed have printed these and use them, They’re using industrial 3d printers that use like polymer and like powder and liquid and stuff to bind together. They’re not printing an extruded high-temperature plastic because that’s the so they don’t have to combat that shrinkage issue. Now the printers they’re using. I mean, you can probably buy a used one now for like, you know, ten thousand twenty thousand dollars. But the really big industrial printers new. I mean, they’re like a hundred thousand dollars for a really good one like an object. And the average person just doesn’t really have access to that or the money for even if they did, why not go buy a CNC machine for like, five thousand dollars that could just mill these out of blocks of aluminum? So you can see with my air 15 right here. Put it up there on the death that goes right in. There fits flawlessly. Not a lot of play comes out so I would expect it to just go right into here, too. I mean, it looks like everything lines up, but it’s just that shrinkage is just enough to cause you issues. Now you’re let’s take a closer look at this compared to the actual Ar-15 Lower receiver. That’s on my Smith & Wesson! Alright, so there’s my Smith & Wesson. Teach you through! We got our printer and receiver rule and line that up right on there. Get it lined right up with the pinhole in the backside. And you can see. It actually looks to be a really really good fit. You can see the seam lines up on the backside perfectly and comes up so like. I said if I took a file and I took sandpaper to this and I worked on it for a couple of hours. I could probably transfer all the parts over. I can take it out and I’d probably be able to shoot it and I might get like two or three shots off before It finally breaks now, getting depending on the material you use if you could get the. ABS shrinkage under control and print it out in ABS. It would probably be durable and you get more shots, but honestly, you’re not going to get enough shots off to make it even worth your while, and plus you don’t have the upper. You don’t have the barrel. All you basically got and you don’t have the trigger parts and all the metal pieces that you need in here. So realistically, all you can do is print that. I mean, it’s it’s honestly not much better than saying. I can print a plastic handle for it, but you do have to admit it makes a pretty cool decorative piece. You know, it’s pretty good conversation starter, and they’re like. Oh, man, hey, that’s pretty cool. It’s cool is that in the air 15 lower and trust me. People have already commented on it with it. Just sitting on my desk in my other videos. Holy Birmingham. So this was a fun little experiment. I got to admit the fact that it was able to print an ar-15 lower with no support material. And all I had to contend with was a little stringing that I could repair. I have to say I’m actually pretty shocked with that. I didn’t think that all these little holes and everything we’re gonna come out as clean and as good as they are so so that was a pretty cool shock, but at the same time, what happened still was what I thought would happen. And that is between the shrinkage of the printer. Some of the tolerance issues that you have to deal with because of that shrinkage. It’s not practical for you. Just print it out, and I hope I Ellis traited that the only part that you can really print out in them. I use that loosely. You can print out some of other plastic pieces on the gun, but the only functional piece of the gun that you can print is the lower, which just holds the trigger mechanics. I mean, it’s not really the most important part of the gun. Now granted, the ATF classifies this as the gun. This is like what the part that has the serial number on it, but realistically a barrel. I can take a barrel. I can stick a bullet in the barrel and I can smack the damn thing with a Emer with like a little nick on it. Fire that primer pin and boom off my bullet goes. How am I gonna fire around with that? I’m not, and for all of you guys that are saying. Oh, why didn’t you swap it over and go test-fire? I’m gonna be honest with you. All the ranges that I go to are indoor ranges, And if the range Master saw me pull out a navy blue, a ar-15. He’s gonna tackle me. I mean, I’m gonna have zip ties on my hands and [ __ ] don’t. Tase me, bro. Don’t tase me. And if I had this one on my gun, he would question my intelligence, so we’re not gonna test-fire it. And plus, there’s plenty of videos if you want to go search. Youtube of people taking these things out and getting a couple shots out of them before they break, but take a close look. When you see those and see if they’re actually using desktop 3d printers because you can see the lines from a desktop 3d printer if it looks like it’s a completely smooth part and everything on, it looks like perfect and polished chances are that was a very expensive printer. And if you want to pay shapeways, you know, a thousand dollars to go print ar-15 that will fire six shots. Sorry, air 15 lower. Not the whole gun. I’m trying to trying to reiterate that that you can’t do a whole gun and then the other pistol, which I’ll probably print at some point, Too, Is The Liberator now granted the Liberator since all, the pieces are printed on the same printer. Even though there’s a little bit of shrinkage in there, the parts are still gonna fit together perfectly. They should anyway, but you still need a metal firing pin in the gun for it to shoot, and it only shoots 22 caliber and the barrel wears out really, really quick, so even though that’s closer to 3d printing a real gun, it’s it’s not really practical and to be honest. People have been making guns forever. You can go search on. Youtube, you can go buy $10 worth of plumbing pipe from your your hardware store disclaimer. I’m not responsible for anything that you guys do. This is for informational purposes only. I shoulda said that earlier in the video. But anyways, you can go buy a couple pieces of pipe. Put them together. Screw a cap on it and fires pull gauge shotgun shells. 12-gauge is a a lot of energy. You see this guy right here? Yeah, it’s probably about five six times as much gunpowder in a shotgun shell. I mean, it’s it’s a lot, so if you can spend ten dollars where the pipes screwed together and all you need for tools is a drill that cost you like you know, 20 bucks at Home Depot. I’m not even sure why people are even interested in 3d printed guns. The only thing I can think of is that they’re worried that they can slip through radar. They can slip through scanning and stuff at the airport, but at the same time with the backscatter machines and stuff like that, you can’t a deck of playing cards through the damn airport anymore, so guys! I hope you thought it was cool that I was able to print an ar-15 lower. I actually thought it was cool, and in case you haven’t figured it out yet. I am a complete gun advocate. I love guns. I have mini guns. I have mini ammo. I love going shooting. I keep all my stuff safely locked up at a gun vault because I do have a child, and I never ever want him to get his hands on this without me. Showing him how to safely operate it when he’s older and I certainly don’t condone people going out in 3d printing, these damn things and building guns out of them and go shooting them to make Youtube videos, cuz. You know, granted the lower. You’re probably gonna be alright. The worst that’s probably gonna happen. Is the back is gonna snap off the damn thing, But honestly, it could explode. You could get a piece of shrapnel or something. Stuck in your arm, and if you try to 3d print and upper, you’re crazy. I haven’t seen anybody 3d print an upper yet. If you print it up or you shoot it. Nothing blows up. Oh, yeah, dude, you kiss. Kiss your ass good-bye so guys! This has been a fun video for me to shoot, especially seeing what the printer could actually produce here. And I hope this gives you guys a little bit of satisfaction that. Hey, he finally printed a gun or at least an important piece of one. So now we can put that to rest for a while and move on to bigger, better things and now. I’m not printing a bong or a dildo. Yeah, those are the two second most requested items. Well, guys, it’s been a lot of fun. I do love playing with my guns and by playing, I mean safely operating them. So you guys have a wonderful evening. I’m gonna go out on my lawn and shoot into the air until the police show up. That was a joke, mmm? I really hope you enjoyed this video. If you did please like favor and subscribe. It helps me a bunch also. Come follow me on Facebook and Twitter. I love interacting with you guys you.