I know (just) enough about both to know that it wouldn't.

DMLS is markedly not 3D printing. While DMLS produces high quality parts it also requires, as Tuefel alluded to, machines that costs millions of dollars and the process itself is both slow and expensive as fuck. Basically if you go the laser sintering route, you'll end up paying five or even six figures for a 1911 that's slightly more durable than your average cheap $300-400 RIA 1911.

The kind of stainless steel powders you can get for a commercial metal-capable 3D are absolute miles away in quality from the high grade stainless steel used in those few guns that use all stainless steel parts (most of which are rifles chambered for a pistol calibre. Specifically intended for the kind of gun owner who wants to do shooting at a range, but doesn't want to spend much time on actual maintenance. Due to various reasons, they happen to be very popular here).

If you try to print a 1911 in a commercial 3D printer, it will explode in your hand. It'd safer (and cheaper, neither a 3D printer capable of printing metal and metal powder capable of being used for 3D printing are all that cheap) to get a Llama 1911. I repeat: It would be safer, cheaper and more reliable to get a fucking Llama.

By commercial, I am assuming you mean what most people could afford rather than the machines used by print and manufacture companies.

You can actually find lots of stainless steel in high-stress parts like barrels though they are cut from solid billet stock. You can find them in just about every caliber from .22lr up to .338. I even found some partial blank billet barrels that just needed to be bored out.

Yup, commercial as opposed to industrial.

Also, and I'm not a gunsmith so my knowledge here isn't supreme, but I was under the impression that in modern firearms (unlike, say, old muzzle loaders which have a capped barrel), the barrel doesn't have to deal with most of the pressure any more. At least not compared to, say, things like the lock(ing lugs), the bolt face and the recoil spring.

Which is why most firearms, even cheap stamped ones, still use hardened steel in those parts, but unless we're talking machine guns that aren't meant to be man-portable (and therefore don't tend to be designed to allow the barrel to be changed in the field), you rarely see reinforced barrels any more.

With the majority of barrels, the chamber is directly part of the barrel which eats a lot of pressure stress. The rest of the barrel still has to withstand a good bit of pressure as well which is why lightened barrels that have their walls thinned can be risky sometimes. You can get barrels and chambers as separate pieces but that isn't as common as the all in one because all in one tends to be stronger. Overall the three parts of a firearm that has to handle the most pressure are the bolt, barrel, and chamber.

Compared to older firearms though it usually takes a fair bit of effort to fuck up a barrel. Most failures are from short rounds becoming lodged in a barrel and a second round being fired behind it, ammo outside of the firearms pressure rating, ammo defects like hot rounds, manufacturing defects, post-market alterations made to a barrel, or damage done to a barrel by other means. The most common is some sort of barrel obstruction even a partial one.

The .45 ACP is not a very high-pressure caliber, so I can see it being feasible in a 3D printed gun. SAAMI (the US Sporting Arms Ammunition Manufacturer's Institute) rates it at 21,000 psi of chamber pressure.

By comparison, the 9mm Luger (Parabellum) bullet is SAAMI rated at 35,000 psi - same as the .357 Magnum.

By the way, I don't think they actually stated that they made the entire gun out of 3D sintered metal. If the barrel was a standard forged component, then I can envision it working. But I strongly doubt that they could make a gun barrel on a 3D printer. The slide and frame, that I can see. (AMT, the maker of the infamous Hardballer Longslide, of Terminator movie fame, made their frames and slides out of stainless steel castings.)

Edited by pwiegle on Jan 15th 2019 at 5:09:08 AM

The Bundeswehr are busy testing the G95K out.

Duck hunters found a Bren in Chesapeake Bay.

The Marines tested the SkyWall100 Anti-Drone system at Quantico Base.

Edited by TheWildWestPyro on Jan 16th 2019 at 12:06:45 PM

I guess the HK 416/417 really have won the AR wars.

*Looks at the tagline for that blog*

Eeeeeewwwwwwwww.

Just be glad it isn’t TTAG.

Yeah, it's more of an Artifact Title than anything else, because they sure as hell are focusing on politics too.

pwiegle: I did some digging around to see how much of the 1911 DMLS pistol is printed. Everything except the springs according to the company. It was apparently a publicity stunt to prove that the DMLS could handle high stress and pressure as well as to attract customers from the firearms market as they are FFL holders as a company. They claim they even fabbed the rifling. They did state they needed to do finishing work after the fact which I imagine would be deburring and surface polishing before fitting the pieces together. Even with that in mind the machine is still pretty expensive, needs a high draw power source, and also needs argon and nitrogen gas feeds. That is before you start counting the base materials they used and the fact they have trained specialists prepping the models and running the machines. This thing sounds about as involved as full-scale from blank to finished product traditional firearms manufacture, to be honest.

So what is the deal with TFB as a tagline or acronym?

Yeah, they are dipping a bit too deeply into wonk territory with there political pieces. Though their history pieces tend to be pretty good.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Jan 16th 2019 at 5:48:07 AM

I for one, welcome our new AR overlords.

I have to say, SHOT is very disappointing this year. I think we’ve finally reached market saturation for tacticool menswear (every damn booth has a cobra belt on display) and multi-thousand dollar A Rs.

True Velocity Partners with General Dynamics on US Army's Next Generation Squad Automatic Rifle

tl;dr - the company is partnering with General Dynamics to make a (mostly) non-metal cartridge that will be lighter than brass and they are going to test it on a Squad Automatic Weapon.

Will this beat out LSAT? We'll have to wait and see.

Edited by TairaMai on Jan 28th 2019 at 3:22:55 AM

Army vs. Marines: Which Service Had the Better Bullet?

This company is building ‘barrier-penetrating' 5.56mm rounds for the Marines

Both those articles are garbage.

Nearly every time examination after the fact shows the troopers were not as good a shot as they thought or thought all bullets were magic shooting through cover and heavy brush. We have accounts of people eating magazines worth of ammo from a wide variety of ammo and keep on going. You read enough Medal of Honor citations and you get the gist that caliber based stopping power is effectively a myth until you get into weapons of notable power like heavy machine guns. I will say this yet again. The only guaranteed drop is when you damage or destroy enough of the central nervous system. That is the only way it happens with anything approaching reliability.

The second article is equally garbage. Casual examination points to giant glaring holes in the thought process such as grades of protection and even M-855 can defeat the most common lower tier armor. Class three soft armor can be ate up and spat out by M-855A1 and Black Tip AR ammo no issue. Hard inserts are the big deal and we know for a fact there is no solution they can find to anyone using ceramic inserts without a notable increase in the cartridge power. Steel inserts have disappointing performance overall and can be defeated by FMJ within about 150-200 meters out of a long barrel AR platform.

Following your argument to its logical conclusion, once a cartridge delivers some minimum required level of energy on target, it comes down to which one is easiest to hit a target with. And thats usually the one with the flattest trajectory. More power will, however, give you longer range.

That was the argument the FBI made after a lot of testing with the 9mm, .40 S&W, and the .45 ACP.

Their conclusion that despite actually imparting less energy the 9mm was the superior choice of the 3 because it's effective lethality was still the same while having less recoil and several other advantages.

I think it was actually Tuffy who shared that article a while back.

Demarquis: More or less yes. The Advantage of rounds like the 6.8mm SPC is that they lose less momentum over distance.

Of course with a heavier bullet comes more recoil but the 6.8mm SPC is reportedly not as bad as the 7.62mm and is closer to the 5.56mm so is more easily controlled.

The fun will come when they start making the AP or Enhanced Performance Rounds like the designs used in 5.56mm 855A1 or the 7.62mm M80A1.

The 6mm AP/EP rounds are going to be nasty.

The 5.56mm EPR performed better than originally planned. At the start they had to stop using it in some shoot houses because it was perforating the old shoot house. There have been a couple demos where it can defeat steel plate hard inserts of about class III. However, the ceramic inserts still stopped them just fine. I want to see what the 7.62mm variant does in comparison.

Of course, the downside to ceramic plates is that the warranty only covers the first bullet. I've heard that they can stop additional shots, but at that point it's closer to playing slot machines than counting cards.

Nah they work pretty well even on top of the same hit. They stop 2-3 before complete failure unless they are hit with something particularly nasty.

Cool. I'm still gonna consider finding something solid to take cover behind after the first warning shot. Or maybe shooting whoever is trying to damage my issued IPE.

Yes but that's like published structure weight limits. It's a case of "we only guarantee it'll work up to this point", not that it will crumble to dust after one.