Liberator gun 3d print

V&A · The Liberator – The World's First 3 D Printed Handgun

Technologies often develop faster than the laws that govern them. When libertarians (those that uphold liberty as a core principle) in Texas exploited 3D printing technology to make their own gun – and especially when they started sharing the files to make it – it unleashed a panic about unregulated design. It was also the day that 3D printing lost its innocence.

The Liberator, 3D printed hand gun, Cody Wilson/Defense Distributed, May 2013, Texas, US. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Cody Wilson, a former law student from Austin, Texas founded Defense Distributed in 2012, to defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms. On 6 May 2013, Wilson took a crucial step in his crusade for popular access to guns when, on a private shooting range in Austin and in the presence of BBC3, he fired the world's first 3D printed gun. The next day, he released the design drawings of the gun online, open source. In the first two days of their release, 100,000 people across the world downloaded the drawings. The invention of this so-called wiki weapon sparked intense debate. It transforms the way we think about new manufacturing technologies and the unregulated sharing of designs online.

The Liberator, first fired 3D printed prototype hand gun, Cody Wilson/Defense Distributed, May 2013, Texas US. Museum no. CD.40:1-3-2014. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Wilson's motivation is a sincere, but very literal and libertarian interpretation of the US Constitution's Second Amendment: the right to bear arms. The ultimate moral and legal authority of that document, for Wilson, justified his actions. He christened the gun 'The Liberator'. Wilson says of his work that he "never thought of it in terms of design" – the design and distribution of the Liberator is for him a political act.

The Liberator is made of fifteen parts of ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) plastic, printed individually on an industrial grade Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer. The printing process takes around 20 hours, and the pieces can then be assembled to make a fully functioning firearm with the addition of a single metal component: a standard nail for the ring pin.

The Liberator, 3D printed hand gun, designed by Cody Wilson/Defence Distributed, manufactured by Digits2Widgets, 2013, US. Museum no. CD.1:1 to 16-2013. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The Liberator STL files were made freely available on Wilson's own search engine for 3D-printable models, DEFCAD. In Wilson's view the Liberator, in its robustness, strength, and refinement, showcases "everything that is great about 3D printing in this one design; the great tour of what is possible in 3D printing".

On 8 May 2013, Wilson and Defense Distributed were ordered by the US Government to remove a number of files from DEFCAD. The Department of State began investigating whether Wilson had willfully violated the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). These regulations implement the provisions of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA). According to a letter issued by the State Department, by allowing the download of the design files for the Liberator, Wilson could have been contravening US export regulations by "transferring technical data to a foreign person, whether in the United States or abroad".

DEFCAD was ordered to cease hosting and distributing the STL files for the Liberator and a number of other designs. Wilson was not breaking any laws in the production of the firearms themselves. Wilson is fully licensed to manufacture both Title One (rifles, shotguns and handguns) and Title Two weapons (improvised weapons and machine guns). But suspicion revolved around Defense Distributed operating a not-for-profit exchange of information – one of the problems was that Wilson was not seeking to monetise the Liberator.

The potential punishment enforced by ITAR for each violation of the AECA is a ten-year prison sentence. If only 0.1 percent of the 100,000 downloads were to non-US citizens, Wilson was looking at spending the rest of his life in prison. The gun he designed has come to exemplify what Wilson calls an 'empty space in the law'.

The V&A has acquired three Liberators as part of it's Rapid Response Collection: one in its component parts, one assembled, and one that had been fired by Wilson. We have also acquired the CAD files and some 3D printed AK47 and AR15 lower receivers and magazines that show the development of Wilson's thinking from making replacement parts for existing semi-automatic rifles, to the development of the Liberator itself.

This article is an edited extract from '3D Printing an Empty Space in the Law' by Louise Shannon, and was originally published in Volume 38: The Shape of Law, January 2014.

Background image: The Liberator, 3D printed hand gun, designed by Cody Wilson/Defence Distributed, manufactured by Digits2Widgets, 2013, US. Museum no. CD.1:1 to 16-2013. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

3D Printable Files for Cody Wilson's Liberator Gun are Now Available to All on 3DShare - 3DPrint.

com

The never-ending talk of 3D printing guns continues to run rampant among owners of 3D printers, as well as legislators and gun control activists all around the world. While the idea of 3D printing a gun can seem like quite a scary scenario, sometimes we just need to step back, relax, and take a look at the entire situation. Guns can be fabricated with or without a 3D printer, and the guns that have been made on desktop 3D printers have been far from reliable. These weapons have proven to be dangerous to the shooter as well as anyone in the vicinity when it is fired. While legislators and gun control lobbyists try their best to make a spectacle over the dangers of 3D printed guns, the reality is that if someone wants a gun to commit a crime, there are much easier ways of either fabricating or purchasing a firearm.

It was just last month that we reported on the fact that the Liberator gun, designed by Cody Wilson, had made an appearance on 3D printing repository Thingiverse. After about 90 minutes of being up and readily available for anyone to download free of charge, it was removed by MakerBot, as a violation of their Terms of Service.

Earlier this week, however, the same designs have been made available by a user named “ooscar8” on 3D printing repository 3DShare. In a listing that refers to the gun simply as “Gun 8 mm printable,” it appears as though all of the 3D printable parts for the famed Liberator gun are there for the taking.

With 3DShare marketing themselves as the “reddit for 3D printing” and as a 3D printing repository where “anything goes,” this latest upload of these design files will certainly test that claim. We caught up with 3DShare founder and CEO Mark Joseph, to ask him if he plans on removing the design files from the site.

“We do not plan to remove the files until we are told there is a legal problem,” Joseph tells 3DPrint.com. “My opinion on what can be shared on platforms like 3DShare is not relevant in this discussion. We will listen to the community and the law makers in a democratic manner to make sure that any decisions are transparent and not the opinion of one person who runs a website.”

So it appears that for the time being, there will be no action taken to prohibit the distribution of these 3D printable gun files from the 3DShare website. At the time of writing this article, the design files had been downloaded just five times (update: 76 downloads at the time of editing), yet many more people viewed and liked the item.

In the meantime, the debate over whether or not the distribution of 3D printed gun files should be outlawed remains one that is sure to have many legal battles ahead. What do you think? Should 3DShare remove these files? Should the distribution of 3D printable guns like Cody Wilson’s Liberator be outlawed? Discuss in the 3D Printed Gun Hits 3DShare forum thread on 3DPB.com.

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Tagged with: 3d printable gun • 3d printed gun • 3d printed liberator • 3dshare • cody wilson • download liberator files • liberator • liberator gun • thingiverse

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How the Liberator (Liberator pistol) works

There is a 3D printer, there are blueprints. What else is needed in order to print a gun?

I don't know much about weapons, so I can shamelessly screw up with the description and name of some parts. Corrections are welcome. Also in the comments, srach, trash, waste, sodomy, conspiracy theories, opinions “now everyone will print a gun and I will kill everyone” and “now I will print a gun and I will not be afraid of gopniks in butovo” are welcome. Questions “does he shoot?” are not welcome. - nine0006 I haven't tried it myself read the disclaimer at the end of the article.

You can see what the device looks like in the first photo. And it consists of 16 parts (for reference - the Makarov pistol consists of 32 parts):

Total weight - 162 grams, although it may differ depending on the filling of the parts. I suspect that the padding should have been adjusted to the maximum, but I did not. The weight of the spent plastic is a little more due to the printing of substrates and supports.
Mounts - pin. There are matching holes in the connecting parts, into which, after combining these parts, a pin is inserted (in the photo with details, these are tubes in the lower left part)

The device was printed on UP! from 3DPHOME. Due to the small working area, it had to be printed in 4 passes, and the parts broken during assembly were printed two more times. The total printing time is something like 20 hours.

Pistol frame with trigger guard:

Hole for fixing the barrel in the frame:

And here is the barrel with the mating part, which is inserted into the frame and fixed by turning:

Here two positions are marked - fixed and not:

Handle:

Attached to the frame with a pin:

Like this:

- due to uneven thermal expansion of the plastic. I had to put a drop of acetone there and strongly squeeze the frame for about 20 seconds - the crack stuck together.

Let's move on to the pistol mechanism. A trigger (what we press with a finger), combined with a trigger pull (connects the hook and everything else) and with a sear (a thing to hold the hook when cocked). nine0003
It is the same, but with a return spring put on it (returns the sear and the trigger to its place after pressing - it is necessary mainly for the convenience of reloading):

Here is a notch in the frame for one end of the trigger rod:

This is how the rod is installed from the outside:

And this is how it looks from the inside:

When the hook is pressed, the return spring is compressed:

To return it to its original position after being released, and to be able to reload with one pull of the trigger. nine0004

I couldn't find a name for the next part, but it could be called the trigger frame:

Remember the three holes in the frame? The same three holes and here - so the two frames are attached to each other. But more on that later.

This is the trigger and its pin for attaching it:

The trigger is inserted into the frame and fastened there with a pin:

Due to the fact that only one pin is used in the mount, it can move from this position:

even a little more):

By the way, the previous photo shows parts of the mainspring - two snails. These are (they are the same):

You can see that the hole in the center is not round, but with a hook. They snails are attached to the frame to protect against rotation when fired. Like this, from one side and the other:

Then they will be connected by these two parts:

Here's how to call them, I don't know for sure. They serve to attach the mainspring to the trigger. Why there are two of them, and one freely rotates on the other - I don't know. The first time the inner part broke after almost every shot, printing with the part set vertically (so that the layers are printed perpendicular to the axis) and dipping in acetone helped. By the way, the unpresentable appearance of springs is also associated with acetone - I didn’t dry the details a little and a space formed under the top film. It does not affect performance. nine0003 This is what the trigger assembly looks like:

Now you can take these three pins and install it in the frame:

The pins go in with force, but it is quite possible to do it with a finger:

The gun is almost assembled, only the barrel remains :

One survived dipping in acetone, and the second was left as it was printed, control group:

Here is the mechanism assembled:

When the trigger is pressed, it pulls back the mainspring and engages with the sear:

And now it’s just waiting for the hook to be pressed in order to hit the striker with all its force (it should be in place of the hole in the frame of the trigger mechanism):

We shoot:

Taken from habrahabr.ru

Drawing of the Liberator pistol for printing on a 3D printer

on a 3D printer

InoSMI materials contain only assessments of foreign media and do not reflect the position of the editorial staff of InoSMI

At the count of three, a shot is heard, the echo of which spreads across the Texas prairie. John, a tall, wheat-haired engineer, has just pulled a seven-meter cord tied to the trigger and quite successfully fired the world's first fully 3D printed pistol.

“So, let's go, One, two…”

“Damn it! Exactly!" yells John, who asked me not to give his last name. He hurries to check the gun bolted to the aluminum frame. But before him, 25-year-old Cody Wilson, a man with a square jaw and short hair in a baseball cap and T-shirt, reaches the weapon. Yes, John fired the shot, but the gun is Wilson's creation. He dreamed of creating it for more than a year and even gave it a name - Liberator (Liberator), thereby paying tribute to the cheap, single-shot pistols of the same name that the Allies parachuted into the skies over occupied France during World War II. nine0004

But unlike the first Liberator steel pistol, Wilson's weapon is made entirely of plastic. 15 of its 16 parts were created inside a used $8,000 Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer. This printer uses a computer program to deposit plastic layer by layer on a three-dimensional object, creating solid objects with the same ease with which a conventional printer applies ink to pages. The only part not printed is a regular hardware store nail that acts as a striker. nine0004

Wilson crouches in front of a pistol and pulls out the barrel, which was printed that same morning in four hours. Although there had just been an explosion inside, neither the barrel nor the body of the gun was damaged in the slightest.

Wilson checks his brainchild for a few more seconds, then gets up and says, "I think we did it." At the same time, his facial expression is a little incredulous and skeptical.

Last August, University of Texas law student, radical libertarian anarchist Wilson announced that Defense Distributed, a non-profit organization based in Austin, was registered to create firearms with nothing more than a 3D printer. At the same time, the creation of such weapons should be available to everyone. Wilson was going to call this weapon Wiki Weapon and put its electronic drawings on the Internet so that anyone from anywhere in the world could download them. By doing so, he intended to nullify all attempts at gun control and blur the line between gun regulation and information censorship. “You can print a deadly device. It sounds a little scary, but that's what we're going to show,” Wilson told me at the time. “Wherever there is the Internet and a computer, weapons can appear.” nine0004

On May 1, Wilson assembled his Liberator for the first time from printed parts and gave permission to a Forbes photographer to take pictures of the unverified weapon. The weapons were tested the next day at a remote private shooting range an hour from Austin. Wilson asked not to reveal the exact location of the shooting range.

The verdict is: the gun works. The Liberator was fired with a standard .380 cartridge. No noticeable damage was found on the pistol after the shot, although another time there was a misfire, because the firing pin did not hit the primer of the cartridge exactly due to misalignment. As a result, everyone heard an unpleasant sharp and dull knock. nine0004

Printed weapons have limited ammo for the time being. After firing the pistol cartridge, Wilson loaded the Liberator with a more powerful 5.7x28 rifle cartridge. He moved back to safety with John, and John pulled the yellow cord a second time. This time, the gun exploded, sending chunks of white plastic flying into the air. The first field trials of the Liberator came to an abrupt end.

Heading back to Austin after the first test firing, Wilson was very unhappy with the relative success of his printed offspring. He seemed to fixate on the misfire and began to mournfully reflect on the rigid schedule he had made for himself in order to eliminate all the shortcomings before posting the blueprints of the gun on the net. “I don't have the feeling of winning,” he told me. “There is still a lot of work to be done.” nine0004

But the most important test of the "Wikiweapon" has not yet taken place. This is the moment of truth that must have been spinning in Wilson's mind when he saw his first prototype blown to plastic shreds. To shoot a pistol, you must hold it in your hands.

***

By Friday afternoon, photos of the world's first 3D printed handgun were posted online and sparked a new wave of controversy over the much-touted technology, which caused a huge crossfire in American politics. New York State Congressman Steve Israel has responded to the development of Defense Distributed with new calls for a revision of the law banning the manufacture of weapons that cannot be found by metal detectors. “Checkpoints, customer checks, and gun laws will be of no use if criminals can print plastic firearms in their homes and then safely smuggle them through metal detectors,” reads a statement that Israel sent to me and other journalists. nine0004

Breaking News: On Sunday, New York State Senator Charles Schumer supported Israel's call for new legislation to ban 3D-printed guns. "Any terrorist, any person with a mental disorder, any domestic tyrant and criminal will be able to open a weapons factory right in his garage," Schumer said, speaking at a press conference.

Israel and Schumer are far from the first to oppose Wilson and his work on printed weapons. In August last year, Defense Distributed was denied a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo. In October, 3D printer maker Stratasys confiscated a printer loaned to Defense Distributed after it found out what it was being used for. In addition, Wilson says he was denied access to two workshops when the tenants found out what kind of work he was doing. The company had to relocate its workshop to a 4-square-foot room in South Austin. It is the size of a small closet, and the 3D printer, which itself is the size of a refrigerator, can hardly fit there. nine0004

But whenever Defense Distributed ran into obstacles, it found a way around it every time. She collected donations from donors using the Bitcoin electronic payment system. Now, thanks to the rapid rise in the price of this cryptocurrency, 99% of Defense Distributed's assets belong to Bitcoin. In March, she received a federal firearms license, which Wilson framed and hung on the wall in his organization's tiny workshop. In addition, she fully complied with the requirements of the law on undetectable firearms, since Wilson inserted a 170-gram non-functional steel cube into the body of the gun so that it could be detected with a metal detector. Wilson spent $400 on this model, which he set up in the doorway of a test shop. “Our strategy is full and even excessive compliance,” he says. (Of course, there is no guarantee that all other manufacturers of the Liberator will insert a piece of metal into its body in the same way to detect a pistol. )

Defense Distributed's first handgun success will now help silence some tech skeptics. Many critics (including commentators on this blog) have argued that no plastic pistol can handle the pressure and heat that comes with detonating a cartridge, and that the barrel is bound to deform or explode. However, the Defense Distributed design did the trick. After the test firing, which I observed, Wilson showed me a video of these tests. The plastic barrel he printed was attached to a non-3D printed gun body. It fired ten shots of .380 caliber ammunition, and broke only on the eleventh. nine0004

Even Wilson himself admits that he does not understand how this is possible. But there is one important trick here. The fact is that the barrel of the pistol was additionally treated with acetone, which was then removed by evaporating it with a frying pan with water and a tourist burner. During this treatment, the bore is slightly chemically melted and becomes smoother, reducing friction. In addition, the Defense Distributed printer chamber is maintained at 75 degrees Celsius, which increases the toughness of the parts. Stratasys has patented this technology. nine0004

Defense Distributed's goal is to gradually adapt this technology for use on other, cheaper printers, such as the $2,200 Replicator that Makerbot sells or less. Even if the barrel deforms after firing, it can be removed and replaced with a new one in a matter of seconds.

Wilson does not hesitate to talk about the controversy and controversy surrounding his project. The massacre in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, in which one shooter killed twenty children and six adults, has forced him to look for ways around pending gun control laws with renewed vigor. While Congress was debating limits on magazines larger than 10 rounds, Defense Distributed 3D-printed 30-round magazines for the AR-15 rifle and AK-47 assault rifle. In March, she posted on YouTube a video of the bottom of the AR-15 receiver, which is guaranteed to fire hundreds of shots. There are restrictions on this item. Anyone who can print it can easily order the rest of the rifle parts by mail. nine0004

Wilson himself has been criticized for becoming the most visible figure in the Defense Distributed team of about 15 volunteer designers, designers and engineers scattered around the world. He was threatened to be killed many times, and many wished Wilson that someone would shoot him with a weapon he had printed. The Wired edition included Wilson in their list of the 15 most dangerous people in the world. The Coalition to End Gun Violence calls him a "staunch rebel" who advocates anti-state violence. "This guy is essentially saying, 'Print your own guns and be prepared to kill government officials with them,'" said Ladd Everitt, spokesman for the Coalition to End Gun Violence. "It's unbelievable that after the Boston bombings we never started talking about him in those terms." nine0004

But Wilson says he does not advocate any violence or riots in America. Its purpose is to demonstrate how technology can be used to circumvent the law until the state becomes useless. “It's about empowering people to create their own sovereign space… The state will increasingly be sidelined, asking us to slow down,” Wilson says. “It is about creating a new order on the ruins of the old order.” nine0004

Wilson does not deny that his weapons could be used for murder or for political violence. “I acknowledge that this device can be used to harm people. But it's a weapon, he says. “However, I don’t think it should be banned because of that. I think freedom is more important in the end."

He tends to think of his pistol as a liberator, as its namesake, with which the French Resistance fought during the years of occupation. Then it was part of a psychological operation aimed at reducing the morale of the invaders. Wilson believes that with his project he will deliver a similar symbolic blow to states around the world. “The enemy has taken note that weapons are falling straight out of the sky,” he says. “But our performance will be even better. We have internet. " nine0004

***

On a hot Saturday afternoon, Wilson returns to the remote shooting range where he first tested his pistol. This time no one from Defense Distributed joined him, and even Engineer John went to Houston for the annual National Rifle Association conference. But along with Wilson went his father Dennis, who works as a lawyer in Little Rock, Arkansas. He flew in to witness a historic moment: his son decided to test-fire a 3D-printed handgun for the first time. nine0004

Over the past few days, Wilson has been editing the blueprint file and reprinting the barrel, firing pin, and body repeatedly, trying to match the firing pin and fix the misfire problem. But as the moment of testing approaches, he becomes calmer. The father asks how many kilometers to the nearest hospital. 45 minutes drive. We are thinking about how to make a tourniquet if everything ends badly. “You guys are making me nervous,” Wilson says, smiling uneasily.

Everyone stays behind while Wilson himself opens the case with the newly printed parts and collects them.