Tech hobbyist makes shoulder-mounted guided missile prototype with $96 in parts and a 3D printer — DIY MANPADS includes assisted targeting, ballistics calculations, optional camera for tracking
www.tomshardware.com
Quite the feat...

Despite the tech-cool factor of the project, Tom’s Hardware does not condone making your own weapons system at home.

    • GreyEyedGhost@piefed.caEnglish
      6·
      14 hours ago

      Reminds me of a time when I went to a maker space open house, and they were showing all kinds of cool stuff, including fairly advanced 3D printers for time. They mentioned there was programming to halt prints of things like gun parts, so it would be very hard to make guns using them. I commented, “Besides, you can make better ones in the metal shop in the other room.” He replied, “Yeah! <brief pause> No!”

        • GreyEyedGhost@piefed.caEnglish
          1·
          3 minutes ago

          Is that the sliding pipe gun? I think all you need is materials, a hack saw, and a drill. But with a machine shop, the materials list is just steel and some springs, and you can have a gun as good as any we had prior to the last century.

    • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zipEnglish
      11·
      10 hours ago

      While I am fully opposed to a 3d printer ban (and abhor the efforts of Bambu et al to sneak that in), it is very important to understand why that is not a fair comparison and, if anything, sets a threshold that can be used to argue FOR a ban.

      I’ve ranted in detail before so I’ll do the short version this time:

      You are not going to make a barrel or springs yourself. And the good news is that you don’t need to. None of that is a controlled/registered part (for the vast majority of guns) and you can literally buy those at a walmart equivalent. And there at least used to be pre-packaged bundles available online for your ghost gun needs.

      So that mostly leaves the receiver and fire control unit. I will bet you money that giving a rando off the street 24 hours to figure out how to go to the local communal machine shop and make even a frigging sten and they will fail miserably. Whereas there are videos (fuck vice for how they abused their workers but old-vice has a really good video where they literally made the gun Luigi allegedly used) of people going from 0 to glock in 12 hours of print time and 4-5 hours of filing. I forget if they actually made a silencer or not (since that is a really dark grey area legally) but that is also very printable.

      And that is the big difference. How much that matters when you are considering a country where you can buy the same gear that Tier 1 Special Forces use to abduct (admittedly really shitty) world leaders for under a thousand bucks is a HUGE question. But from the “ghost gun” perspective? There is VERY much a big difference between having a CNC and machining a receiver+FCU versus doing the same with an Ender 3.