Hasta La Gadget!

As a lover of all things mechanical, I’m in awe of Chris Fenton’s Entabulator. Using an old book about mechanical loom-making, a 3D printer and some serious patience, he engineered a computer that can read a program off of punch cards and, in this case, calculate the Fibonacci sequence. The machine runs using a hand crank (Fenton notes you can overclock it by cranking faster), and it is quite finicky but also quite beautiful in its own way.

Obviously the world doesn’t need this Entabulator. It is so wildly impractical that it’s almost ludicrous, and the usability is limited (at least in this iteration). But isn’t it great that it exists? I’ve been messing around with 3D printers for most of this year and I’ve found a great deal of joy in wresting the means of production from Big Plastic by mass producing little parts and trinkets (this is my new business card) but I’ve also come to understand the real value of 3D printing.

In short, these things allow us to create what we can imagine. Whereas a few years ago, building something like this out of wood and metal required a different set of skills and tools, now you can build most of it online and “build” it in a few hours. It allows for hacking in a very real sense — the consequences of failure are almost nil when you use these tools as compared to situations where a builder has to work in less forgiving materials.

The Entabulator, while beautiful, is more important as an artifact of a post digital age when machines can beget machines. It’s actually quite thrilling.

You can download the project here and build one yourself. Because it’s programmable, you can entabulate all sorts of stuff — a dubious but exciting prospect, to be sure.

Now that we have confirmation that the Liberator 3D-printed pistol can be fired without destroying the body, let’s address what this means for 3D printed weapons and, presumably, homemade weapons in general.

Does the pistol work? Yes, it can be fired at least once without damage to the body of the gun or the person at the trigger. Andy Greenberg at Forbes has seen the gun fire multiple times and the video above shows one shot.

Is it a real pistol? No. This is more of a zip gun than a pistol. Zip guns were improvised firearms made of tubes, rubber bands, and nails. Kids fool-hardy enough to shoot one (this cohort included my own father who showed me how to make them) were promised a second of hair-raising and potentially deadly excitement when they made zip guns out of pipe and rubber. To fire one, you fitted the cartridge into the pipe and pulled back on the nail attached to the rubber band. If it hit the charger properly the bullet would fire. A similar thing is happening here: a spring-loaded nail is hitting a cartridge.

The barrel of the gun is threaded but I wouldn’t expect this weapon to be very accurate. Think of this gun as a controlled explosion generator. It uses a very small .380 caliber bullet which is deadly, to be sure, but quite small.

Could I print one? Yes. You can easily download the 3D-printable files from DEFCAD.org (here is a private mirror) and if you have a 3D printer you can easily print any of these parts.

The creators built this gun using the Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer, a high-resolution printer that works similarly to the Makerbot but offers a far finer and more durable print. This printer has a layer thickness of .25mm, however, which the Makerbot can easily match.

Would I print and fire this using on my Replicator? No. I’m far too risk averse. I asked multiple 3D home printer manufactures and none would comment specifically on firearms, so there is no implicit or explicit promise of safety.

Will someone try to print it on home equipment? Yes.

Is this legal? Yes, but I’m no lawyer. It is a legal, homemade firearm and those have been made in basement workshops for most of this century. In most cases, a Federal Firearms License is mandatory to begin making or manufacturing weapons. For example, anyone building this gun would be a “Manufacturer of Destructive Devices, Ammunition for Destructive Devices or Armor Piercing Ammunition.” Anyone can apply for this license, thereby making the manufacture of this thing legal. For decades, however, the need to license was a minor barrier to entry into what would be a non-trivial process. The tools and materials necessary to build a real gun in your basement were expensive and it made economic sense to legally safeguard your home workshop. The manufacture of a 3D-printed weapon, however, is trivial, and can be built by anyone with an investment of $8,000 or so for a Stratasys printer or, for the less risk-averse, a home 3D printer that costs about $2,000.

It is also designed to comply with the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988 because it contains a small block of steel. From the print instructions:

It is, in short, legal to make a gun and this is a gun.

Can this be stopped? No.

What’s next? The cynic would say we will soon see the first murder with a 3D-printed gun. The cynic will also say that this will cast 3D printing in an entirely new, more sinister light and could affect the home printing industry dramatically. The cynic would also expect a great deal of messy legislature to come out of this that will, depending on which side of the gun debate you fall on, “get these off the streets” or “infringe on our rights.”

A cynic would also say that the entire Defense Distributed agenda is an example of trolling that will eventually do more harm than good. The cynic would also say that a harsh government crackdown would also be equally silly.

A nuanced approach is absolutely necessary.

The non-cynical would find this to be more a proof of concept than a real manufactured weapon and say that it was bound to happen eventually. 3D printing has made manufacturing trivial. This is a logical evolution of an entrenched industry and a centuries-old product. Gunsmithing is not a new hobby. However, it just got much easier.

If the whole of human knowledge were to be wiped out tomorrow, how would you recreate the consumer electronics industry so you can jam out to some rockin’ tunes? Why you’d build these unique 3D-printed headphones. Except for some twists of wire, these cans consist of thin pieces of printed plastic and the speakers are actually plastic with a coil of copper wire embedded, by hand, into a set of tiny traces. Even the audio plug which consists of wire wrapped around a small plastic spindle.

You can download the project here and print it yourself or marvel at how the creator, designer J.C. Karich was able to use wire and plastic to build a pair of cans that actually work. He obviously had to source the wire and magnets (although, arguably, he could have dug the ore himself, right?) but the rest of the project is completely hand-designed and printed on the fly, an increasingly common feat with today’s 3D printers.

The audio quality looks surprisingly good, all things considered, and the design is ingeniously primitive. Writes Karich:

Sadly no one has reported actually being able to build these things yet on Thingiverse but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Who knows? Maybe this is the future: artisanal headphones.

We didn’t find much in the way of news at the Inside 3D Printing Conference and Expo here in NYC (and, we’re sad to say, our press badges were just old-fashioned 2D printed), but there was plenty to look at, thankfully. Between the slew of business and consumer devices and the boatload of printed objects, the event was part business conference, part art show. And while the real star was the still-fresh world of desktop home printers, plenty of companies brought out their big-gun industrial devices (including at least one really sweet giant 3D scanner). Peep the gallery below to check out some of the eye candy from the event.

Filed under: Peripherals

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MakerBot and OUYA announced a partnership today that will allow gamers to print their own OUYA game console cases at home. The partnership will see OUYA create 3D design files for Thingiverse.com, MakerBot’s 3D printing design repository, which are designed to be used with the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D printer.

The OUYA Game Console Enclosure design created by MakerBot allows OUYA console owners to print their own case, which includes a lid and a spring-loaded button for housing the hardware. They can also be printed on the MakerBot Replicator 2X Experimental 3D printer for those who want to use ABS instead of PLA to print their designs.

It’s a move that brings an advanced level of customization to the OUYA, which is already based on an open-sourced development kit, which, while it limits developers in some ways, allows for a wide range of flexibility. The addition of home 3D-printable hardware elements makes for yet more personalization options, and could make for additional opportunities for game creators to develop case mod tie-ins for their titles.

MakerBot says on its website for the OUYA console kit design that it can be opened with a user’s own 3D printing software to make modifications and additional customizations, so we could see much more than the standard Yves Behar-sourced cube with a rounded edge at the bottom.