Boy, howdy. Just when you think it’s not safe to walk down a dark alley unarmed, a 3D printing service company out of Austin, Texas goes and prints a metal gun. Solid Concepts has ‘done gone’ the unthinkable (to some), the unimaginable (to others), and has used lasers, powdered metal and considerable time to 3D print a classic 1911 pistol, complete with hand grips, which were also 3D printed. They were successful manufacturing the gun with this process and, as you’ll see, were also successful firing the gun.
Present (3D Printed) Arms
Solid Concepts makes one very astute comment at the beginning of their blog post announcing the success, “This is not about desktop 3D Printers.” They’re right. This is about a DMLS (Direct metal laser sintering) printer that would take up the better portion of your living room and costs nearly $1M dollars. The DMLS machine is likely an EOSINT 280 that has a minimum 18′ x 12′ (4.8m x 3.6m) installation footprint, has a 9.8×9.8×12.8″ build platform and uses a 200 watt laser capable of sintering Aluminum, Steel, Stainless Steel, Colbalt Chrome and Titanium layer-by-layer with a resolution down to 20 microns.
It’s with this printer that they printed 30+ parts of the pistol using 17-4 Stainless Steel (slide, frame, internal components), Inconel 625 Nickel/Chromium (mainspring, beavertail, hammer) and SLS Nylon (handgrips). They were not on a mission to make a gun cheaper, faster and easier. They were out to prove wrong anyone who says DMLS printed parts are not strong or accurate enough for production use. They do indeed prove that in the video footage of the gun firing where, except for a little snag on the slide you’ll see at test fire, it performs beautifully.
As you can image, they’ve received a lot of questions about the gun, particularly about how they created the rifling inside the barrel? To which they say, “The gun is 45ACP. Its riffled and the riffling was built directly into the part – or as we like to say, ‘grown’ into the part – using 3D Printing. This gun has NOT BEEN MACHINED. We used hand tools for some post processing (our finishers are wonderful), but we did not machine this gun. It’s born this way.”
What else is unique about Solid Concepts? They have a Federal Firearms license (FFL), which means they can legally manufacture (print, machine, cast, whatever) and sell gun parts for those who qualify. Ready to send in your pistol .stl’s down to Austin?
