Speaking of DIY, here is a great example of hacking the AR into select fire. As precision machining, 3D printing, and 3D metal printing becomes increasingly miniaturized and cost effective, the debate about gun control becomes more and more useless.
Categories: Arts and Crafts
2 Comments
SiG · January 24, 2024 at 9:30 am
I still get the Defense Distributed emails and I’ve got to say their whole concept is attractive. You can buy forgings (castings?) called 0% lowers that just have the basic shape of a lower and finish them on your manual or CNC machine tools, but DD has true 0% lowers: blocks of solid aluminum. The only way those get outlawed is to outlaw the sale of raw aluminum.
Their machine is self-calibrating or aligning. I’m sure it has some amount of learning involved, but nowhere near machining that block by hand. You don’t put in a block and get out a finished lower, but you do two or three blocks you put together into a functional lower.
3D metal printing is still too expensive and printing a plastic model that you cast in molten aluminum and then machine into a finished lower is very involved and requires a lot of different skills.
The tech is heading in that direction, but not to the commodity level for a while. Defense Distributed seems like the best option right now.
Outlawing the sale of aluminum blocks? “For sale only to licensed machine shops?” No more Online Metals or Speedy Metals or any of the others? I can kinda see that happening. Forget guns, you might machine an internal combustion engine and contribute to Global Warming.
Pics – Area Ocho · January 25, 2024 at 11:13 am
[…] are pictures from someone who went and made one of the conversion kits for an AR. It is a 3D printed, drop in kit that converts a semiautomatic AR into select […]
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