Sometimes you have a run in with a customer that ain’t worth having-- no matter how much money they pay.

That’s Best Korea^TM to you!

I have designed several 3D printed firearms related items.

I designed and printed shims for my Winchester SX4 shotgun, (Winchester claimed they couldn’t design them and make them work), and I uploaded the .stls for the set so other shooters could make their guns fit better so they could hit targets better.

I also designed a 3D printed EZLoader for a SIG P365 pistol. Those 12 round double stack single feed magazines are nearly impossible to load without one. And I felt the commercial ones that cost $40 or more were too expensive. So I designed something simpler and cheaper you can make at home for yourself.

These designs came about because I discussed problems with other shooters on several different shooting forums. Does that make me a criminal? While neither of my designs are anything like a Glock switch, no one knows just how far the law could be stretched if wanted. And one thing everyone knows is just how ignorant police are about laws. Not to mention just how impossible it would be for the state of New York to police the entire internet in search of such files and discussions. They can’t even stop you from downloading a pirated copy of your favorite video game. This proposed law is more feel good theater than anything that can be considered effective.

And if what I could do with my 3D printer scares people, just imagine what I can do with my metal lathe, mill, and welders…

Slide over a bit, I’ll join you…

I looked PHA up. Color Fab offers some at a fairly reasonable price, but limited colors. It seems an interesting choice for printing. I do like the heat resistance of >120C. The printing temp range is low and pretty narrow and needs hair spray. I wonder if it’s comparable with PEI print sheets.

But it still has a price hard time competing with the $11US per kilo of PLA brands like eSun.

Gemini has popped up pnce since it became a thing. I simply clicked no and it’s gone away. So hopefully it stays away.

Congtrats! you just made a pipe bomb! And one that isn’t as good as a steel pipe You do understand that PVC pipe would not be able to contain the pressure of even the most anemic cartridge don’t you? Even a 1" schedule 80 PVC can only contain up to 520PSI @ 73F. Modern Cartridges easily generate 12,500PSI for a light shotgun target load of birdshot.

A simple google search, (which YOU could have done yourself), shows it’s abut 1 in 1.5 million miles driven per accident with FSD vs 1 in 700,000 miles driven for mechanical cars. I’m no Teslastan, (I think they are over priced and deliberately for rich people only), but that’s an improvement, a noticeable improvement.

And as a an old retired medic who has done his share of car accidents over nearly 20 years-- Yes, yes humans swerve off of perfectly straight roads and hit trees and anything else in the way also. And do so at a higher rate.

You are trying to judge the self driving feature in a vacuum. And you can’t do that. You need to compare it to any alternatives. And for automotive travel, the alternative to FSD is to continue to have everyone drive manually. Turns out, most clowns doing that are statistically worse at it than even FSD, (as bad as it is). So, FSD doesn’t need to be perfect-- it just needs to be a bit better than what the average driver can do driving manually. And the last time I saw anything about that, FSD was that “bit better” than you statistically.

FSD isn’t perfect. No such system will ever be perfect. But, the goal isn’t perfect, it just needs to be better than you.

All work done in FreeCad.

My favorite personally reverse engineered part

And a favorite design I use every day a holder for my loose tea strainer to catch draining water

As an old and now retired medic. My personal definition of dead was if you made into the back of my amp-a-lamps or not. If you did you weren’t dead-- you were merely having a bit of a bad day. I might have needed to do your breathing for you and I might have needed to make your heart pump blood. But until some doctor somewhere decided you weren’t worth his time and effort, you were still alive. Because I don’t haul dead people.

So, by my definition as a trained and professional medical person, you where never dead-dead. Just someone have a bad day among many others having a bad day at that time.

I used to teach math in the local school. The kids had a great interest in 3D printing because I had a few fun items in my classroom that I had 3D printed. I decided to spend a couple of weeks teaching a bit of CAD through having the kids spend it designing a personalized key chain to print.

It took me 3 days of class time to teach them how to use a mouse…They couldn’t grasp the idea that a touch screen and CAD don’t go together, you need that mouse to make it work. It quickly became apparent that things quickly became difficult for them if it doesn’t have a touch screen.

And while some classes are always a bit better than others, there was always a noticeable number of them that struggled with using a mouse.

It only appears so. It’s flipping the xz and yz planes only as it hits each quadrant. It just does it really fast. Looking closely at the layer lines will show you it’s not a true 3D movement.

That still isn’t a true 3D move.

Well achtually…To be pedantic,

A 3D consumer grade printer is not a true 3D tool since it can only move on 2 axis simultaneously. If you watch your printer closely, as it finishes it’s path around the xy plane, there is a tiny halt as it changes active plane from the xy plane to xz plane, lifts the nozzle, then flips the active back to the xy to go along it’s merry way again to lay down the new layer. And no, the hot new scarf joint is still a single plane movement. Sometimes such machines are incorrectly referred to as 2 1/2 axis because they aren’t true 3 axis.

Source: I’m an old retired toolmaker. Trust me Bro.

The short story is that all materials have internal stresses when made. Whether it’s lumber or steel or cast iron, they all have stress that need to be relieved before you can expect them to hold their shape. Some materials are worse than others. And anytime you cut or machine them, they can move in unexpected ways that can make your parts not fit together as required to make a working machine.

A “green” iron casting has a LOT of internal stresses created by the rather violent process of making the casting. Even way back in the day, they understood the problems that those green castings had. And if you want your lathe to be stable enough to hold those tight tolerances to build a train steam engine or bore an accurate cannon barrel you needed to get as much of that stress out of those lathe bed and head-stock castings as possible before you carefully machine and scrape the ways on your lathe into perfection so that the casting becomes as stable as possible.

The best method of relieving those stresses from your raw castings was to repeatedly heat and cool that casting. And the easiest and best way to achieve that was to literally store those castings outside for a few years to let them naturally heat and cool with the changing seasons. If you go on YouTube, you can find videos of British steam engine manufacturing from start to finish. And at some point you will see their outside yard filled with raw castings aging in the natural heat and cold of the changing seasons.

We still age cast iron to today to make it stable enough to use. But we now use accelerated methods of stress relieving metals that are much faster, but more costly.

Concrete lathes are far from a new idea. During WW1, the US needed more lathes than we had. It could take years for a cast iron casting to age enough sitting outside before you could do the final machining to actually build a lathe.

So concrete was tried as a substitute for cast iron. It has some good properties, it cures quickly, is rigid enough, and dampens vibrations pretty well. The downsides are you require a physically larger machine that takes up more floor space, and they are difficult to move making resale difficult, and they don’t last as long in that usage, so they aren’t cheaper in the long run.

Concrete lathes had their day and quickly died out to be forgotten.