I received an email from Defense Distributed (they made the first 3D printed gun) last night. It’s contents were:
Respectfully requesting your attendance for an October Surprise.
September 30, 2014.
Anything more would be total speculation on my part.
Don’t know much about WWII bombers, but the name “Liberator” keeps going thru my head.
Yes, most of those airplanes in the Vid Clip were Liberators.
But also recall the Liberator PISTOL that was made for WW2 Resistance Groups for use in Occupied Europe. You know, the Handgun designed to get you MORE Guns from the Nazis? The one that took longer to Load than to Manufacture?
I’m thinking that DD has come up with Software for something like the WW2 Liberator Pistol for its “October Surprise.”
If so, let’s Download and Distribute as much as we can before the Obama Admin tries to shut it down.
I’ve actually put some thought into modernizing the Liberator pistol – I think it could probably be done using a couple of metal parts (the barrel) but instead of printing the frame, actually make it from Kydex – the common holster material. A bit of heating and pressing into a carved wooden mold (easily made with a dremel tool or wood router) , pining in the barrel and a fire control system, and you could have a cheap single shot pistol.
There’s an interesting notion in one of Neil Smith’s books (“Pallas”), a gun constructed mostly out of a stack of sheet metal laminations a bit like the classic Master lock. Look up “Ngu Departure”. I keep thinking it would be neat to do the detailed design and build one, but I haven’t been able to work out all the details. The background, in that book, was a need to manufacture handguns for people when advanced machine tools were not available.
Maybe they are going to air drop dozens of printed Liberators over DC?
Hmm. Now we’ll have to look forward to being surprized.
This https://markforged.com is interesting technology for this sort of application, because of the reinforcing fiber. That assumes their product becomes real; the website hasn’t changed in months but I have been assured they are nevertheless real. I also wonder if you could use it to make nonmetallic cases.
An article by Oleg Volk reminded me of this notion: it would be very interesting to see a printable suppressor (“silencer”). That can’t be all that hard, and those things don’t need to last a long time if they can be made cheaply/easily. (Oleg points out that in countries with saner laws, like NZ, they are indeed treated as consumable good rather than capital equipment.)
Nothing there yet as of 11:00 EDT.
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