Written by RT News

Published time: November 08, 2013

Engineers at the Texas team of a custom manufacturing company want to make 3D printing more than a novelty, and may have accomplished just that with their latest endeavor: a high-powered, fully functioning metal handgun.

The team at Solid Concepts announced this week that that they’ve  successfully designed, printed, assembled and (accurately) fired  a 1911 pistol created using digital blueprints that were fed  through an industrial 3D printer loaded with powdered metals.

“We’re proving this is possible,” Kent Firestone, Sound  Concepts’ VP of additive manufacturing, said in a statement this  week. “[T]he technology is at a place now where we can  manufacture a gun with 3D Printing.”

The world’s first open source 3D printed gun, the Liberator, made  headlines earlier this year when developers at Texas-based  Distributed Defense released their blueprints, in turn allowing  anyone with access to the Internet and a mere hobbyist model  machine to assemble a plastic firearm without even having to  leave their home. With Solid Concepts’ latest effort, however,  more advanced 3D printing fans are awarded the opportunity to  make something much more in line with traditional firearms akin  to what’s sold in stores.

“It functions beautifully,” Solid Concepts claims, adding  that the company’s resident gun expert was able to hit a bull’s  eye at nearly 100 feet away with the weapon, a feat hard to  contest once someone watches a video of the weapon in action that  has been uploaded to the web.

Every component of the weapon but its springs were made using a  process called “direct metal laser sintering,” or DMLS, a 3D  printing technology that can create metal prototypes in only a  few hours by blasting those powders with an ultra-precise fiber  optic laser beam. The handgun they’ve made with DMLS technology  consists of more than 30 separate 3D-printed components that were  then hand-assembled to form a firearm that has successfully fired  dozens of rounds already, according to the company.

A blog post on the Sound Concepts website suggests the tools, such as the top-of-the-line industrial machine that fires the lasers, make it unlikely that any amateur 3D-printing enthusiasts will be able to replicate the pistol unveiled this week. The printer itself, the company acknowledged, costs tens of thousands of dollars just to acquire on its own. As 3D printing technology continues to climb in popularity and accessibility, however, soon homemade metal handguns could be created at a fraction of the current price.

“When we decided to go ahead and make this gun, we weren’t  trying to figure out a cheaper, easier, better way to make a gun.  That wasn’t the point at all,” Solid Concepts’ Phillip Conner  explained in a video. “What we were trying to do was dispel  the commonly-held notion that DMLS parts are not strong enough or  accurate enough for real world applications.”

“So long sad disfigured Yoda heads, no more pretending like  that’s going to cut it for this industry,” the company jokes  on their site.

Related articles

• First All-Metal 3D Printed Gun Made (and Fired) in Texas (solidsmack.com)
• First 3D printed metal gun (foxnews.com)
• World’s first 3D printed metal gun blows through 50 rounds (pcworld.com)