The Liberator(Gun)

I\'ve recently become interested in 3-D printed firearms. The liberator for example. However, there are info that I just can\'t seem to find.

How many parts are there in the Liberator? Or could the entire gun be printed as a single part?

Would placing metal or other more durable material into the gun barrel make the Liberator better in any sense?

What type of bullet does the Liberator typically accept? I mean it could use a conventional bullet, but what bullet material will sustain the gun for an extended amount of time?

The Liberator itself is printed in parts, 16 total. The only metal component is the firing pin, plastic is just too soft to set off the bullet. It’s chambered in .380 ACP, though they’ve tested it (with little success) in larger calibers.

It’s a very simplistic design as far as printed guns go, most designs use a mix of printed and purchased or milled parts.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by sustaining the gun.

Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 11th 2018 at 9:33:14 AM

Speaking as someone who works with 3D printing/SLM for both polymers and metals (biomedical, not firearms), the Liberator is little more than a toy. It's printed out of hard, brittle ABS (the same material as LEGO bricks) and isn't really supposed to handle more than a single shot. It doesn't really matter what "bullet material" or ammunition type you use, the force of the propellant going off will damage the gun's overall structure and prevent it from further use. In theory you can feed the design to a machine that prints metal powders, but it's going to cost a lot more than it's worth, and you'll likely have to painstakingly machine out all the surface defects to make it even remotely useable.

None of which matters, of course, because the mechanism is only designed for a single shot anyway. Even if the gun's firing mechanism holds, you have to detach the chamber/barrel and attach a new one with a round already inserted. Any semi-automatic pistol on the US market would easily outclass it, while being easier to procure for those with no AM equipment or experience.

Again, the Liberator is basically a gimmick. The reason it's out there is as a marketing stunt for the company's other product: the Ghost Gunner, a CNC machining tool that can automatically craft firearm parts out of slabs of metal. CNC machining is an older, less glamorous tech than additive manufacturing, but it's by far more efficient at producing metal devices at standardised dimensions - including, yes, firearms. In fact, there is a whole market ecosystem in the US that offers 80% complete receivers of AR-15s and other common firearms, which the user could machine to completion at their own leisure - since legally speaking, the receiver with the serial number on it is the only part that counts as a "gun". Stuff like barrels, grips, stocks and optics are "accessories" and remain largely unregulated, so a user could theoretically build their own receiver and assemble the rest of the gun without having to report it to anyone.

The first gun the, Liberator is pretty much a one-shot zip gun. However, it isn't the only example. There have been varying examples put out that change the designs to make them more robust or able to fire more than one shot. There is a revolver variant that does work just fine and there have been a couple other spin-off designs. They have even found a couple during TSA baggage checks. Someone even modified the basic Liberator model to operate like a pepperbox revolver.

So there is your answer. To get it to shoot more than one the pepperbox revolver designs seem to work just fine.

There are examples of laser sinter metal firearms that have been made but you are not going to have access to the printers that made them for cheap. The basic machining to clean up the parts is something laymen can do with generic tools so that isn't a hurdle at all. Neither is getting the powder for the printer. The big hurdle is the units cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The smallest and cheapest unit I have seen is something like 120,000 dollars and you need a furnace for further processing anyways.

Normally, pepperbox designs don't work because of the weight but if we're talking plastics then weight isn't really an issue anymore.

Complete and functional AR-15 derivatives have been made that way. It requires a lot less work than you think. For best results, just print out all the parts that aren't under pressures which leaves out mainly the barrel, the gas tube and the chamber/bolt head. The rest are easily done with simple metalworking equipment, not necessarily CNC lathes and whatnot (though those do offer some of the best quality).

The issue of 3D printed firearms is very much a Real Life version of Can't Stop the Signal.

Would appreciate some sources for that, Tom. My lab uses one of these big beasties◊. If our hypothetical gun geek could afford one of them sans public funding, they'd probably be better off buying grenade launchers by the truckload from an Ukrainian arms dealer instead. That's not to mention the subsequent heat treatment and finishing work. Powder metallurgy products are hella grainy and brittle otherwise, and it's not going to match the strength of a cold-worked, wholly crystalline piece of metal no matter what you do to it. Did I mention that aluminium powder (assuming we're talking about the receiver) can cost up to 50 times its bulk/slab equivalent?

The non-load-bearing parts are pretty much a non-issue; you could probably carve your own stock and handguard out of wood if you'd like. But the receiver is still subject to a lot of mechanical shock and vibrations - it's not like the chamber/bolt assembly were suspended by a forcefield. You'd still be investing Bond villain money into a more fragile version of something that costs $500-1000 brand new. Printing the barrel, gas and bolt assembly is entirely out of the question.

But anyway, plastic guns. Adding non-metal parts to the gun creates the kind of complication that it was supposed to avoid in the first place, I think. The firing pin is just an ordinary piece of nail, but add custom-fitting metal parts and your start-up cost starts shooting up very quickly. You can negate it if you're already working with machining/woodworking tools or are friends with someone who is, though it still says a lot about the gimmicky nature of the original design. The pepperbox spin-off is one way to get around the limitation, I guess - after all, ABS is still a thermoplastic that deforms with heat, so even if it structurally holds up, you probably shouldn't expect it to remain accurate after multiple shots.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Sep 12th 2018 at 12:00:36 PM

Bel: Pepperbox revolvers worked just fine in handguns. Weight was not a serious issue. Given the era they were popular in, the oddball manual barrel rotation was a bigger issue.

Tom: There are not any full AR's built on 3D printers. They have been built on milling machines with some parts built on a 3D printer. They pretty much have stuck with slapping a premade upper onto a either 3D printed lower or 80% milled lowers.

The only firearm to be fully made on a 3D printer was a limited 100 piece run of 1911 derived parts, made by Solid Concepts as a publicity stunt and to raise cash. The individual firearms sold for over 11,000 per gun. We know they were successful as they had fired thousands of rounds through their very first pistol without any notable stoppages or failures.

Firearms manufacturers are interested in the tech and are likely the only ones who could possibly afford the DLMS units that were used to the make the handguns but so far only Solid Concepts has pulled this off and they used really expensive industrial-scale machines for it.

ON the plastic 3d printed pepperbox style, yeah you are not going to maybe get more than two shots out of each chamber before you need to replace it. I can think of a way to make it work but you wind up carrying several of the revolver chambers with you. They are kind of bulky so it isn't practical in terms of overall capacity.

There are 3D printed AR lowers out there, though they’re really not all that reliable. The best ones can get maybe a thousand or so rounds through them before they start to splinter or wear down. That’s what most people think of when they talk about a “3D printed rifle”, though it leaves out that you need a high grade 3D printer and still have to buy the whole rest of the rifle.

Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 12th 2018 at 4:17:01 AM

At first it's in the same vein as the Liberator.

For example, this rifle. (Which broke, unsurprising, but it was 5 years ago.)

Then moving on to stronger parts or receivers such as this AR-15 lower.

AR-15 3D printed lowers have since become somewhat common. (And legally speaking, the lower receiver is the firearm according to ATF and NFA.) And not all of them are simply clones.

Designs and improvements including Pepperbox guns and revolvers have been made as well.

Even Grenade Launchers.

Even more of a complete pistol design.

There's even an industry research and report on such technology.

Even Ammunition is no longer out of the question.

And then you have tons of Gun Accessories and parts being made in part or in full with 3D printing including sound suppressors.

To put it mildly, the genie's out of the bottle, Pandora has opened the box, there is no going back.

Hmm, okay. Do note that all are those examples are divided between homemade plastic stuff that still rely mostly on existing gun parts and complete guns that required extremely high-end SLM equipment (plus hot isostatic pressing and other forms of extensive post-processing) to print out. And in the case of the latter, it's hard to justify the expenses compared to traditionally-manufactured parts with better mechanical integrity. Functional homemade barrels and other pressurised components are still well away.

Ammunition is actually one of the less problematic bits to AM, since it's only supposed to work once, but, y'know, I'd question the efficiency of doing that versus casting/stamping it the old-fashioned way.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Sep 12th 2018 at 8:59:17 AM

Yeah, they're found in the local hardware stores.

Basically all of those examples listed still require metal parts. 3D printed lowers don’t include any of the parts that go in the lower, all those parts need to be purchased. The fully printed pistol and grenade launcher both require metal operating parts that aren’t printed. Printing in metal, like with the printed suppressors and other parts, is far beyond the reach of the vast majority of people.

The whole “Pandora’s box” narrative around 3D printed guns is frankly ridiculous, given the ease with which you can build a gun at home without 3D printing. If anything, 3D printing a gun is way more difficult than just building one.

Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 12th 2018 at 9:27:37 AM

The Pandora's box thing is because both 3D printers, the materials in said printers and the designs used for them are constantly improving. (And becoming more affordable.) At the moment you don't need 3D printing to make a firearm, but you can use it to make a great many things about one and fall under the radar of authorities. The stuff is untraceable and beyond the realm of government control.

You could make the functional bits of a firearm using cottage industry materials and techniques but then outfit it and improve it using 3D printed furniture or accessories or parts (triggers for example).

It's only going further than that from here. Ten years ago, 3D printing didn't really exist. Ten years from now, who knows what it could do.

You could also just order all of those parts off the internet for way less than the price of 3D printing them. The lower is the only regulated part, you can get everything else you mentioned on Amazon.

Anyone with basic firearms knowledge can put together a working weapon out of parts from their local hardware store, and thats been true for ages.

If there’s a Pandora’s box when it comes to firearms, it’s long since been opened. 3D printing isn’t really changing anything.

Edited by archonspeaks on Sep 12th 2018 at 9:45:09 AM

And there's no changing the basic physics, either. This◊ is a cold-rolled steel beam. This◊ is a sintered product from a steel powder base. Notice how the first one has small, manageable defects with all the grains neatly aligned in one direction, while the second has large pores and cracks randomly jutting out in all directions? Yeah. All of today's known AM techniques - laser sintering, film deposition, 3D extrusion and all - give out amorphous products that look like that inside. It's not just about the printer or the material. It takes a whole industrial post-processing line to clamp down on the inherent defects and render the final metal product useable.

Dayum. I knew sintered steel would be iffy but that looks like bloomery iron.

Tom: The endpoint being there are no completely 3D guns and none of that hardware store junk will come close to making them the same as traditionally manufactured firearms. Things like barrels are made from high pressure rolling of billets and then milled, bored, and rifled. The high precision high-stress parts all need to come from traditional manufacturing as it is if you want more than a couple shots down the barrel or to avoid frequent misfires. It is worlds easier to make, buy, and sell traditionally made firearms given they are not only more reliable but far more prolific. The plastic pepper box zip guns could be a potential concern but they need a bit more development to improve how well they work and reduce bulk. Even ammo is better off bought or made with more traditional methods. TAOFLEDERMAUS tested 3d printed shotgun shells and the things were self-destructing when fired and were almost too dangerous to use.

You have maybe a handful of examples that could be used in the same role as old Saturday Night Specials but beyond that your better off just getting a traditionally made firearm. 3D printing can only tackle a limited range of parts of the gun and remain viable.

Man those spectrograph pictures of DLMS are ugly and almost as ugly bloomery steel like Bel said.

Edited by TuefelHundenIV on Sep 12th 2018 at 2:18:03 PM