You aint gonna believe this ! ! !

[Carolina Cast Bullets]

Imagine the uses in the shooting world. Kinda puts gun makers on alert.

fly in the ointment, COST ! ! !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZboxMsSz5Aw




Jerry
Carolina Cast Bullets

[Bent Ramrod]

Not if they start "printing" copies of the machine for sale;-).

That is truly mind-boggling technology though. I still remember the one on "The Twilight Zone" where the guy used it to "print" a revolver.

[secondshooter]

thats impressive!

[kbstenberg]

Gunstock ideas would be limitless. Maybe us lefties will cach up to the rest of you.

[DCP]

You aint gonna believe this ! ! !

I not sure its real.

It takes a 1-1/2 hours they sure left a lot out .

How does the computer know what size to make internal parts

I really need to see more.

So for now, I don't.

[canyon-ghost]

http://www.rapidform.com/

[leftiye]

Plastic gun w/ metal liners?

[williamwaco]

Not only is it real, they are semi-affordable AND you can build one from a kit.

[Charlie Two Tracks]

Beam me up Scotty!

[OBIII]

Yes, it comes out in plastic in it's current form. More research and testing and they will be able to create it in whichever you have a preference for, Can you say "Replicator"/"Duplicator", aka Star Trek? The dimensions are determined by the "scanning" technology used to create it in the first place.

[3006guns]

I wonder how it would work on stacks of money? Oh, never mind...............

No, wait! I use to know this girl back in high school............

[MtGun44]

Plastic. Some versions working with metals, to some extent. Internal parts are not
automatically scanned, humans have to put in the seperations between pieces like the
movable jaw and the screw pivot pin, etc to make the parts separate.

Just the latest extension of 15 yr old technology. Most of these machines make pieces
that glue together corn starch to make the parts. Some use lasers to cure liquid polymers,
some use lasers to sinter powdered metal.

Most accuracy is too poor to make anything really precision, around +/- .005 for most
and rough surface finish.

Not there yet, but getting better.

Bill

[bobthenailer]

Thats really impressive ! Ive never seen anything like it before , Im going to show the viedo to a machinest friend this afternoon.

[slide]

That blows my mind! I don't care how precise they aren't yet that is amazing!

[JIMinPHX]

That is the first that I've heard them called 3-d printers. In the past they were called solid modeling machines. The last time that I looked at one was about 10 years ago. The parts that they made were fairly accurate, but not structurally strong.

[lbaize3]

How about boolits? Wouldn't it be great to simply print the projectiles we want, the way we want them?

[uscra112]

MTGun44 hit the nail. This technology has been around for years. Pratt & Whitney was using it to make casting forms for turbine blades back in the 1980s. They were called "stereolithography" machines when I saw them. It works for materials that you can cause to melt almost instantly with a laser, which pretty much limits it to plastics. The energy involved to make useful parts by sintering metals would be monumental, and would seriously affect the molecular structure of the metal. Don't look for "printed" gun parts in steel or any other high strength materials in your lifetime.

[Thumbcocker]

When they get it printing im steel I will take a target sighted 5" triple lock, a #3 in .44 Russian, and.........................