3D Printing about to go down the tubes.

We live in a pretty cool age, with new stuff popping into existence all the time. And I'm now taking bets on how long it's going to take one of those things to get government regulated into stupidity.

3D printers: They're pretty cool. You can make any shape you want with one, just about. And these things are getting better all the time. You can get a hobby model for under $1,000. Or you can get a top of the line one for a lot more that can print working machines, right out of the box.


(3D printer company Objet prints a fully-assembled-in-the-printer gear toy, just because they can.)

3D printing has already hit some thorny legal issues. Think about it this way: You have a box. You feed a spool of plastic or a hopper of metal powder or whatever in one side, and STUFF appears in the box. Whatever stuff you have a computer file describing. Cue the intellectual property lawsuits as people start printing patented, trademarked, and copyrighted stuff. That's been happening already as more and more hobbyists have started printing toys and swapping their model files on the 'net.

Well, somebody just pulled the files for an assault rifle off a gunsmith's website, and they printed it.



And it worked.

Badly. Like, apparently it jammed, a lot.

But it worked.

For less than 30$ in plastic, (and, to look at the picture, a few supplemental metal parts) and some hours of printer time (these things are slow) this guy claims to have had a working AR-15 assault rifle. No background check. No registration for special permits with the BATF. Just two $15 spools of ABS plastic thread in one side of the box, and some hours later, a (badly) working assault rifle.

3D printer tech is getting better fast. And it's getting cheaper fast. It wasn't many years ago the cheapest of these printers was tens of thousands of dollars, and gave sloppier prints than the ones you can build yourself for a few hundred today. And that rate of progress looks like it's going to keep going for a while. So that (parenthetical) about the printed assault rifle being kinda crappy? That's going to go away. Give it a few years, and there will be printers that cost less than your laptop that can turn out a reliable gun as easily as they can spit out a knock-off Barbie.

Let the betting pool begin: How long before we start seeing legislators holding forth on the need to regulate 3D printer technology?

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Postscripts:

I'm not sure I disagree with them. So you can print a gun, do what you're going to do, then what's to stop you from turning the gun into a series of action figures when you're done?

I don't think it's a winnable battle, though. This would be similar to software piracy in its nebulousness and level of difficulty in enforcement - or so I'd assume.

I love technology, and I don't think you'll find anyone more irritated than me when people argue that we have to check technological progress because something bad MIGHT happen, but I do have to wonder how we can cope with more destructive and more readily available weaponry - that's a problem that goes well beyond 3D printers, though. Maybe I'll just print out some body armor.

Out of curiosity, are explosives possible with this technology and, if so, at what level?

Yeah, 3D printing is going to make the whole RIAA/MP3 battle look minuscule in comparison.

Exciting/interesting/scary times ahead.

I assume that anticounterfeiting measures will soon be required of 3D printers, just like they are of regular printers. That's not to say that counterfeiting won't occur, it'll just mostly be traceable.

3D printers make shapes out of material. The ones we have right now don't actually mix the materials up for you, unless you count mixing some dyes in. So you'd have to put explosives in to get explosives out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannerite

interesting - thanks for that link.

Yes, yes, in theory someone could make this happen. But it would be Somewhat Tricky.

In short, maybe it would work, or maybe the components would just catch fire in your print head. And you'd need a 3D printer that has some novel features even to give it a try.

It would be pushing the limits of the tech as it exists today. Interesting as a thought experiment, but starting from today's tech, still a few years and millions of dollars of R&D away. I don't think we need to worry about folks printing their own grenades or guns complete with bullets already in the magazines anytime soon.

In this instance a little experimentation would be needed but I believe a single Magnum bullet would suffice. So what you would do is make a hand grenade from the printer, mix the tanarite and put it into the hand grenades and use a single magnum bullet inside each as the detonator for this. The most complicated part would be making some sort of heavy spring loaded firing pin to set off the single bullet and thus the tannerite.

Mind you I could be wrong about it working but it would be a place to start if you wanted to make your own hand grenades.

Plausible. If we're just limiting the printer to making the jacket and the mechanism, and leaving the actual 'splosives mixing to the old fashioned ways and a funnel, that sounds doable. For a metal grenade jacket, we're still talking about a fancier grade of 3D printing than your usual hobby printer. I haven't heard of a hobby-model SLS (selective laser sintering) printer, but presumably someone is out there working on it as we speak.

Sturdy plastics and your standard pineapple fragmentation grenade should suffice. tho you could do a thin layered hand grenade and just add ball bearings inside it for fragmentation.

One of my co-workers has one. It's pretty cool, but I can see how that AR would jam. The finished pieces from his printer need some finishing work to be smooth.

Huh. And here I just wanted one to print unlimited Warhammer figs.

Meh, a 3D printed AR-15 is nothing, how about a rocket launcher? Scalia thinks they ought to be OK. The National Rocket Association approves.

It would be nice to have a 3D printer that painted them as well. Honestly, if I could save on both the time and money, I'd could seem myself getting back into this hobby.

How the hell would you ban them, though? Most of the ones people are making now are assembled from DIY kits, half of which are adapted from machines originally intended for other purposes. I can see them banning the sale of them off the shelf at Best Buy, but you can't exactly ban a guy who knows how to make a machine to squirt melted plastic.

I'm still processing the fact that these things exist in the first place. Holy shit. When did it become the future?

MakerBot.

I just wanted it to make some customized 4e D&D figures. I can never find minis that look like the characters in my head.

This Cory Doctorow talk is relevant to the question of government regulation, since, as he mentions, 3D printers are driven by general purpose computers. BTW the talk is 30 minutes long; the rest is Q & A.


Here's a nifty bit of disruptive 3D printed open source tech, other than guns and grenades, that probably would never be produced commercially. The Free Universal Construction Kit lets you print out adapters that interconnect Lego, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, K’Nex, Krinkles (Bristle Blocks), Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Zome, and Zoob toy building blocks.

Damn if they make 3d printers illegal in the future we'll have to go back to making guns with a forge, mill and lathe.

I wonder is someone could make suicide bomber jacket out of that with the 3D printer & make it look like a normal coat...

It better not go down the tubes, I own stock in this.

I was worried about my stock going down when I first read this, but then I realized, even if "home use" is banned, companies will still adopt the tech to reduce production time and waste, or at the very least, produce prototypes quickly.

3D printer != loom

I mean, there are CNC knitting machines as well. But that's a completely different tech. And if you wanted it to do something new and challenging (a suicide bomber jacket! that looks just like a normal jacket!) you still have to figure out how to actually do that. It's a printer, not a genie. You still have to give it a design.