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Fun fact, you don’t need a 3d printer to make ghost guns, and you’ve never needed them.
Laws restricting printers aren’t about firearms, it’s about restricting access to disruptive technology before it disrupts too much of how we innovate. (Because innovation has historically been tied to big-industry with the little guy being unable to get into it. Because it costs a shit ton.)
Yep you can make a zip gun with a couple pieces of pipe and a nail.
I honestly think those are better than the printed plastic versions in every use case except one.
Laws restricting printers aren’t about firearms
No I think they are definitely about firearms and how they don't want people printing untraceable Glocks and suppressors and assassinating Our Betters in broad daylight with them.
Don't need a printer to do any of that. it's also faster just to drive to a state that allows gunshow loopholes and buy an otherwise untraceable firearm. takes less skill, too.
All true, but doesn't mean they can't be motivated by a red herring.
It would be awesome for a bunch of woodworkers to carve some ghost guns to show how stupid this is. Printing can’t be that much stronger than oak, so it should work.
part of the problem with that is that most of your ghost guns are "just" the AR 15 lower receiver- the part classified as the "firearm" because of some technicality only a lawyer can understand.
It's not a load bearing, nor is it exposed to any particularly high levels of heat, nor any sort of particularly nasty gasses. So that can be printed in just about anything if the printer's resolution is good enough. (IIRC, they typically call for resin printers.)
Then, the ghost gun peeps just buy the rest of the components retail and pay cash.
for fully-printed firearms, you're looking at things like DMLS or other kinds of precision metalwork. It's the kind of work that would be more expensive than roadtripping to arizona and getting loophole-gun.
It should be totally possible to whittle a functional AR-15 lower. Especially if you wanted to mate it to one of those fancy new bufferless uppers, so you wouldn't even have to worry about the stock and buffer tube.
The bufferless part is a bit of a sticky widget as the back of the reciever usually stops the rearward travel of the BCG. So actually buffer tubes being made from steel and allowing for slower deceleration of the BCG make for a better candidate for "softer" lowers.
If there is buffer less upper that doesn't use the lower receiver as the backstop for the BCG please let me know. I stopped following shotshow a decade ago.
I'm not 100% certain. Possibly the Brownell's BRN-180, although I haven't handled one personally to see if the endstop block it comes with relies on the rigidity of the buffer tube ring to stop the bolt carrier or if it attaches to the rest of the upper itself in some way. The recoil springs are entirely captive and attached to it, at least.
I suppose you could also just reinforce the shit out of that area in your design if you knew you didn't need to have a big hole through it.
BRN-10, Jackyl, CMMG Dissent all rely on a buffer tube ring and will crack the back of a printed AR lower.
https://hoffmantactical.com/designs/sl-15/
This will happily cycle an AR 10 upper with a buffer tube.
You have a good idea about reinforcement. Screw the endstop block into a blind hole in the back and have a monolithic lower with stock. Like a short stroke WWSD rifle.
This video perfectly summed up a lot of my thoughts from this post yesterday talking about a similar law in California.