DIY Mags & More!

[Wildwood-Lake]

Need to check this out....First read the news on the first link, then make one on the second link just click Browse on the top of the page.

http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/02/13/print-draw-fire-3d-printing-could-muzzle-new-gun-laws/?test=latestnews


http://defcad.org/

[I'll Make Mine]

You can build a machine that will print those parts for under $500.

Unfortunately for those who might want to print new 30-round mags, I believe California (and most like New York as well) outlaw possession of banned mags that weren't already owned when the law took effect -- that is to say, printing and assembling a Cuomo Magazine might be a felony...

[perotter]

How could they ever prove that you didn't own it before the law took effect? Sometimes one just has to keep their yap shut about some things.

[I'll Make Mine]

How could they ever prove that you didn't own it before the law took effect? Sometimes one just has to keep their yap shut about some things.

If it's a printed plastic mag, they'll assume -- and even if you win the case in court, you'll have lost everything you own paying the lawyers. FWIW, the mag capacity laws are mainly used for "add on" charges anyway -- they catch you for anything else, and find you in possession of an illegal magazine, and they add that to the charge list, and since it's a gun charge, you're now up for mandatory sentences, a misdemeanor becomes a felony, etc.

[perotter]

How are they going to know it was printed?

[Artful]

composition of plastic - not used in commercial operations that I know of.

[I'll Make Mine]

You can see the filament structure in items from any halfway affordable 3D printer. The ones that use a UV laser to instant-cure liquid resin cost tens of thousands of dollars (that's probably what the leased unit was that printed the controversial AR lower); even those higher end printers produce a surface with "jaggies" like a low-res scan. The ones you can build in your home shop push plastic filament through a melter and deposit the melted plastic like an old X-Y plotter drawing a line; build up line after line and you make a 3D object, but you can easily see and feel the textured surface produced by the build-up of plastic "lines".

[perotter]

Good thing that people are making them now. Then there is no way of knowing if it pre or post ban.

[dbosman]

I expect we'll see spring and follower kits to "repair" high capacity mags, soon enough.

[deces]

People are asking about how would they know? Well, when people counterfeit money using a computer (not talking about the federal reserve) software in your operating system encodes "meta data" of who, what, and when in your physical product by law. and I am willing to bet this is the same for 3d printers.

[dilly]

Anybody else think of the food replicators in star trek?

[Artful]

Yes I did think of Star Trek when I first heard of it. We need to get it where it injects different materials at molecular level then we can work on transporters.

[deces]

A stem cell injection machine.

[I'll Make Mine]

People are asking about how would they know? Well, when people counterfeit money using a computer (not talking about the federal reserve) software in your operating system encodes "meta data" of who, what, and when in your physical product by law. and I am willing to bet this is the same for 3d printers.

This is almost certainly not the case for home built 3D printers like the RepRap family (Prusa Mendel etc.). Their resolution is too low to encode anything invisibly, and many of them run on generic, public domain G-code converters and interpreters -- the folks who compile those from source tend to be the sort most likely to blow the whistle if that stuff carries identifying codes (just because it's their nature to be paranoid).

It is true that image editing software (which would be used for 2D printing) stores meta-data in the image file (the current format is XIF, eXtended Information Format), but that data is limited by what the camera produced -- a camera without GPS, for instance, can't encode location information, one with the internal clock unset will encode the clock's starting date and time, and so forth -- and is further limited if the image was rendered rather than produced with a camera or scanner. Beyond that, it can easily be stripped with an XIF-aware image editor (any version of Photoshop after, IIRC, version 5, for instance) or a dedicated XIF editor. Detecting computer printed counterfeit depends more on printer resolutions limits and paper quality than on information encoded by the image software and printer -- there isn't a color printer made that can reproduce the microprint on a modern bill, and the paper used can't incorporate the ID thread or watermark visible in all real bills (no ID thread in singles, yet, but they do use watermark paper).