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DOJ began a PR push last week to find legislative traction for a set of proposed bills that would criminalize the individual production of rifle receivers and magazines with 3D printers. Sections 4 and 5 of the proposed House bill directly criminalize 3D printed receivers and magazines, and mandate an arbitrary amount of metal be part of their fabrication. Beyond suffering from fatal Due Process and GCA problems, the bill’s prohibitions are not extended to manufacturers because (hint) there isn’t actually a security issue at stake. The bad faith and fraud required to hide this from the current public...

“WeaponsMan,” we can hear you thinking. “Dey already done dat.” Well, not exactly. Sure, they printed a gun before, but this time they did something pretty amazing: they printed all 34 non-spring parts in a single go (see the photo of the parts below, fresh from the laser-sintering machine with only the unused powder removed yet). And they printed it of Inconel 625, which you’ve probably never used in a gun before (but if you’ve ever flown in a jet airplane, it was probably the turbofan engine’s hot-section shaft and several other critical parts.Inconel is fairly expensive and is normally...

National Gun Rights Examiner David Codrea reports that Representative Steve Israel (D-NY) has announced his intention to renew the ban on "plastic guns," set to expire next December: A test of a printed plastic lower firearm receiver has resulted in an anti-gun politician demanding renewal of a law against a gun that does not exist, Live Science reported today, citing a call by Rep. Steve Israel, D- N.Y., to renew “the federal ban on plastic guns just days after members of the ‘Wiki Weapon’ project tested a 3D-printed gun part in a live-fire test.” The "Undetectable Firearms Act" was first...

The federal law banning undetectable plastic guns expires in two weeks and Congress is on a Thanksgiving vacation, making it likely the law will lapse — and opening up at least a temporary problem. Gun control proponents say the search for a solution is even more urgent with the expanding capabilities of 3-D printers, which can manufacture plastic guns that can be untraceable through traditional means. Racing the Dec. 9 deadline, Senate Democrats tried to speed through a bill last week keeping the ban in place, but a Republican objected, arguing the legislation had just been introduced hours before the...

3D printing has been making waves in the manufacturing arena which is touted as the next big thing to revolutionise consumerism and product development. Just as e-commerce has removed the boundaries for marketing and brought the consumers and producers closer, 3D printing is expected to enlarge the market for producers by removing the shackles of production volumes, minimising the time to market and customising the product as per individual customer needs and all of this at affordable costs. In the early days of product creation, nuts, screws and hinges were individually hand-crafted for a very long time until the industrialisation...

A dailymail.co.uk article shows the ATF sending two messages: 1.  The 3D printed guns work, so they must be banned! 2.  3D printed guns blow up, so do not make them or attempt to use them! I do not think either message is effective.  Both just interest people in 3D printed guns.  From dailymail.co.uk: The world's first printable gun has been deemed a serious safety and security concern after a gun printed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms exploded before it was even fired. This danger is matched by the problem with fully-functioning 3-D printed guns -...

The world’s first 3D printed metal firearm, “a classic 1911 design,” has been successfully fired more than 600 times, according to Solid Concepts, a California-based 3D printing company.

A selfless man invents way to help countless people, and shares it for free. Well Done Sir, the world can do with more inspiring people like yourself Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=22d_1383771936#ee1xRPKTT3O7Lm9F.99

A group of US scientists have created the world’s smallest human liver which can survive for forty days and works like the real thing – using a 3D printer. The mini-livers, made by California-based medical research company Organvo, are just half a millimetre deep and four millimetres wide but can perform most of the functions that a real liver can. The printer builds up 20 layers of hepatocytes cells, which carry out liver functions, along with two major types of liver cell. It also adds cells from the lining of a blood vessel. This allows the liver cells to receive...

(image courtesy of solidconcepts.com) Let me start out by saying one, very important thing: This is not about desktop 3D Printers. Solid Concepts is a world leader of 3D Printing services, and our ability to 3D Print the world’s first metal gun solidifies our standing. The gun is a classic 1911, a model that is at once timeless and public domain. It functions beautifully: Our resident gun expert has fired 50 successful rounds and hit a few bull’s eyes at over 30 yards. The gun is composed of 30+ 3D Printed components with 17-4 Stainless Steel and Inconel 625...

Police chiefs today defended raiding a toy model shop and claiming they may have found the UK's first ever 3D printed firearm.The seizure, initially described as "a really significant discovery", was part of a much-heralded crackdown on organised crime, Operation Challenger, launched by Greater Manchester Police (GMP). But hours later it emerged GMP may have jumped the gun, releasing a second statement about the raid in which Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood said: "We need to be absolutely clear that, at this stage, we cannot categorically say we have recovered the component parts for a 3D gun." The 38-year-old pony-tailed...

Researchers from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) have developed a naked-eye 3D tablet computer, which should be in the shops by the end of this year. Naked-eye 3D technology has put 3D lens onto the screen, allowing viewers to watch 3D images without glasses, Fang Yong, deputy director of the spectrum modulation technology center at the SJTU Wuxi Research Institute, said on Tuesday. Users will not suffer from eye strain or dizziness. According to Fang, the research team has filed a patent and the televisions and computers with the technology are on the way.

3D Printing Now Brings You Semiautomatic Pistols (The Better To Scare Control Freaks) J.D. Tuccille|Sep. 26, 2013 2:41 pmIt's not yet ready for prime-time (it has yet to be tested), but 3D printing tinkerers have developed a design for a semiautomatic pistol. In fact, the developer says a full-automatic version would be easier to make with available materials. What a long way we've come, in just a few short months, toward the ultimate goal of rendering gun control laws a complete joke. Well...they were already a joke (though a dangerous one). It's more accurate to say we've come a long...

While news on the 3D-printed gun front has been sparse as of late, that's less a matter of stalled development than of the new technology already becoming old hat in this fast-moving world of ours. How else to explain the lack of coverage even as repeating pistols are knocked out on desktop equipment? Consider, for example, the Hexen pepperbox, which has stainless steel liners for its six barrels and is undergoing constant strengthening and improvement as discussed over in the DefCad forum. The video below shows the Hexen successfully fired (actually, it appears to be a related five-shot model),...

"The technological revolution may never end but it does pause from time to time. If investors are expecting the kind of returns that Apple achieved from 2007-2012, they are probably going to have to look elsewhere as smartphones and tablets are nearly commoditized. Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) should provide more successful products but that does not mean they will have an impact to the degree the iPhone and Android had on the lives of consumers and the economy. As when chips and desktops became commoditized after the tech bubble of the 90s, it may take a quantum leap in...

Tea, Earl Grey, hot. Those are the words spoken by Capt. Picard to the computer when he wants his favorite beverage replicated. While we're still a long ways away from that becoming reality, we're taking steps toward it. NASA will be taking that step when it takes a 3D printer up to the International Space Station in June 2014. MORE: How 3D Printing Will Save You

A 3D printer generally moves its printing mechanism in straight paths on it’s x, y and z axes. But a new printer developed by Brian Harms, a masters student at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, uses a robotic arm to print in a freeform manner, angling this way and that, poking its extruder in and out of a bed of gel, where it injects its light-curing resin. By depositing the print material in the gelatinous medium, there is no need for any support structures — the resin stays suspended at its precise x,y,z point. When the...

The latest state-of-the-art color 3D printing technology is used to bring your digital sculpture back into the real world. Voxel by voxel, layer by layer, the three-dimensional portrait grows into the (almost) final product as if by magic.

They are the dreams of dead men: a hat comb, a drinking cup that would not dribble in bed, a stove pipe screw and a flower stand, quietly archived in the United States Patent and Trademark Office for the last century. Until now. Martin Galese, a 31-year-old lawyer in New York, is resurrecting bits and pieces of bygone eras, thing by thing. Not unlike the fictional scientists of “Jurassic Park,” Mr. Galese scours the patent office’s archives for the “design DNA” of antique inventions, then reinterprets them as design files for today’s 3-D printers. He has posted more than a...

GE challenged designers to create a new jet engine bracket. The Maker Movement is a vast and diverse community teeming with passionate hobbyists and DIY entrepreneurs energized to build new products and open their designs to others to improve upon them. They share an infectious innovative ethos that anybody can learn from. Last month, GE challenged the Maker community to use 3D printing to manufacture complex parts for medical equipment, and to redesign a bracket used for manipulating jet engines and make it 30 percent lighter. “We want to develop an ecosystem of designers, engineers, materials scientists, and other partners...