“A Canadian tinkerer who previously claimed to have created the world’s first 3D-printed rifle, only to see the barrel crack upon its first videotaped test firing, has now created an updated version of the gun that was able to fire 14 rounds before suffering damage,” theverge.com reports. “But the weapon, .22-caliber long rifle made out of ABS+ plastic dubbed “the Grizzly 2.0,” still ended up developing a crack after the 14th and final shot. It’s also quite cumbersome compared to modern automatic firearms, as it requires reloading after every shot. Matthew [no last name] further noted that the spent bullet cases were difficult to remove, requiring him to unscrew the barrel and shove a stick into it in order to get them out.” Improvements? Yeah, he made a few . . .

Matthew said he improved upon his first design of the Grizzly by making the barrel 50 percent larger, increasing the size of the receiver (the main portion that holds the firing mechanism), and adding groves to the inside of the barrel.

The gun control paradigm may not be dead, yet, but it’s sure looking a bit green around the gills . . .

 

 

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51 COMMENTS

    • Could you please send me the CAD plans for this rifle…
      Thank you in advance,
      Jan Rabe
      5447Hwy 604
      Pearlington, MS 39572

      • the entire point is so that you cant be tracked. So dont post your adress online.

        *facepalm*

        • Jan, you are obviously new to the internet. Your mail box is going to be buldging with hate mail and death threats from the trolls and anti gun types that visit this site. On another note I’m sure the NSA already has all the IP addresses of everyone that uses TTAG. Just don’t google 3- D printer now.

  3. and with that no people on this earth shall ever be denied arms even in the face of the most ferocious tyrant. Gun control is dead.

    • If gun control is dead, why did this year see the passage of the SAFE Act, the new CT laws, CO’s AWB, MD, and NJ?

      The fight against gun control shall not be won by us, our children, or our children’s children. It shall be ongoing, because as long as there is centralized government, that government will want control over its people.

      • You know that spasmodic frenzy that a person’s body goes through when you’re choking them, right before they die? It’s like that.

        If that comparison meant nothing to you, please forget I said it, and back away slowly.

        • Yep; they could totally ban guns tomorrow, get a complete list of all guns from the NCIS system and pick them all up and the next day people would be CNCing AR’s, home loading ammo and printing rifles and handguns…Gun Control is dead; they cannot achieve their end game, ever.

      • Good grief guys, colorado does not have an assault weapons ban. We got the mag ban and background checks. Lets try to get the info correct.

  4. Dude, this is so awesome it gives me, as Chris Matthews would say, “a thrill going up my leg.”

    The fact that you can say, “Well, that didn’t work, so let’s try this,” do some rejiggering in OpenSCAD, set it up to print overnight and have a new version to try the next morning is freakin’ fantastic. Adding grooves to the inside of the barrel makes me think he’s headed toward rifling, and I’m really going to be curious to see what kind of accuracy this thing is capable of.

  5. Next I want to see a 410 shotgun version. No rifling needed and 4-5 pellets of OO Buck. That would be interesting.

    • That actually seems doable. SAAMI chamber pressure for a 3″ .410 shell is 13,500 psi, and for a .22LR is 24,000, so it seems like it.

      Is it really that simple? Can a gunsmithy type weigh in and tell me why it’s not? Something to do with powder burn rates or something?

      • pressure curves, materials strength, pressure over area (larger area in a .410 chamber and barrel vs a .22 barrel.)

        i forsee some issues when they go to rifling. pressures increase during the addition of rifling, especially in a material not as “slick” as metal.

        • Yeah, and then the question would be would the rifling actually “engage” the bullet, or just get plowed out of the way, and slow the bullet down in the process?. ABS+ is pretty hard stuff, but I don’t know if it’s that hard.

      • How about plastic “sabots” on the bullets to engage the plastic rifling. Maybe a thing coating of polymer type material on the round.

        • It would be a good idea to have a plastic sabot. Maybe two? One around the bullet the other around the casing so that we can make doublestack .22 lr magazines with less curve and trouble.

      • I don’t know how the plastic will react to the pressure over a larger area, but I’ll shed some light on how thin shotgun barrels can be.

        Back in, oh, the era before WWI, Parker (who made very nice shotguns) decided to see just “how thin is too thin?” on shotgun barrels. So they took a set of tubes and started filing down the wall thickness a few inches in front of the chamber, where the pressure would be the highest they reckoned.

        They got the wall thickness of the “fluid steel” of the day down to about 0.012″ before they started seeing bulging and distortion after shooting it.

        Today, gunsmiths usually use 0.025″ as a minimum wall thickness on shotguns, because, well, many gun owners are just stupid. They’ll over-load reloads and blow stuff up.

        Most American shotgun tubes will have barrel wall thicknesses of 0.040+ nine inches behind the muzzle (which is the point shotgun smiths use as their test location, which is adopted from the English, who use this as their proof house measurement point). Many English shotguns might have wall thicknesses down to 0.025 – and I’ve seen at least one Brit gun which had the tubes honed out (to remove pitting) with wall thicknesses of 0.018 – and it was still shooting low-brass trap loads just fine.

      • I dunno. The .22lr has a higher pressure, but over a much smaller area.

        A brake-line is much thinner-walled than a gas pipe and is made of similar stuff, but is good to a much higher pressure.

        Still. If you want to give the thing 1/2″ walls, yeah…

      • By the way, typical low-brass loads (like AA’s) would be a bit over 9,000 psi.

      • It’s simple in theory, but not so much in the real world. Defense Distributed actually tried using a .410 shotshell when doing initial cartridge testing, but the plastic shell would always rupture. Due to the poor strength of a plastic barrel, the brass case of a metallic cartridge is required, as it actually forms the primary breech. Now, if you used a metal breech sleeve, you’d be able to use a much wider variety of cartridges (and extraction would no longer be an issue, allowing for future development of repeaters).

        • That makes sense. I was unaware that someone (who knows what they’re doing) had tried it already. Thanks for the info.

      • There are plenty of great calibers to choose from. although the .22 is small, I wouldn’t be surprised if it caused more problems than lower-pressure cartridges like .410 or .32 long. or maybe even light .38 spl.

  7. If the Confederacy had had 3D printers, just think! The outcome would STILL be the same!!

    The one with the larger caliber wins.

    • And if they had had AK-47s, it would be a pretty good novel by Harry Turtledove, “The Guns of the South”.

    • in ww2, the U.S. had crappy Sherman tanks and the Germans had nice Panzer tanks. our tanks outnumbered theirs nearly 10-1, this led to us having many tank victories over them. so the bigger caliber doesn’t always win.

  8. That thing is cool, but this is hardly a revolution. In less time than it takes to print and with change from the console in the car you could build a smooth bore single shot .22 from parts bought at a home improvement warehouse, sans machine tools or skills. The thing is you could also safely ramp up the same design to almost anything this side of insane. .410? Oh yeah, 9mm? You bet. 12 gauge no problem.

    The thing is that a ‘gun’ as we know it is simply a combustion chamber and a primer striking mechanism. What would be impressive is when the printer spits out a reliable and durable semi auto. I realize this is a proof of concept, but what this ‘proves’ is that the current state of the art is almost infinitely inferior in every way but weight to other types of more quickly and simply constructed improvised firearms.
    I’m not talking about a zip gun, I’m talking about a striker fired single shot in your choice of caliber for about $15-$20 worth of parts and constructed in about an hour. For another $20 and another hour or so you can triple the reload speed and add sights. It’s reliable, very durable and much faster to reload. While 3d printing might well eventually turn out a practical weapon improvised firearms are not a new concept.

    Now if that thing can start printing cheap and reliable cartridges in common caliber someone call me.

    • Ardent, the hardware store type of firearms you describe are indeed very doable. But, and there’s always one of those, has the hardware store gun progressed much at all since the invention of the self contained cartridge?

      I’ll admit that I’m pretty ignorant about computer stuff and engineering, but i see the potential for these printers to develope much farther and faster than the hardware type of gun.

      • Exactly. These things are evolving at an exponential rate. With some tinkering and debugging, this guy was able to make the rifle last fourteen times as long as it did before. Granted, that isn’t very much right now, but at this rate I think we’ll have 3D printed, fully functional AR-15s within 3 years.

        Rome wasn’t built in a day.

      • I fully agree that the printed f/a has far more potential than the hardware store IFA. My gist was that this 14 shot disposable .22 only, all night to make on an expensive piece of equipment aren’t up to the level of the hardware store IFA yet. The pronouncements of the death of arms control are a bit premature, though it may be over the horizon. What I really meant to point out is that it’s already possible to build a much better weapon than the printed versions, cheaper and faster with even harder to ban, track, trace of control material. If the concept of ‘gun control’ is dead it’s because of these at present. What they can control is the quality and efficiency but not the actual production of arms.

        I wasn’t so much trying to disparage the printed guns or their potential as to point out that other, simpler, more accessible and more effective means already exist for the production of low quality arms.

  9. As I pointed out on another site where this
    was discussed…the “point” keeps getting missed..over an over and over and…..sigh.
    Yes YOU have a hardware store with tubing
    in 410 size and a shop in your garage…many
    of us DO NOT. If you live in a freedom deprived
    hell hole like New York, peoples republic of Kalifornia or Taxichussetts you don’t want to
    have the hardware counter person asking any
    dangerous questions either. Printing one of
    these in your own home is a serious advantage.
    You remember the 1st rule of the gunfight don’t you? HAVE a gun…any gun.

    • Fortunately we don’t live in that sort of society, and the arms I’m talking about can be built in a kitchen. The materials list is so innocuous that no one who wasn’t into building them would recognize it as anything more than some home repair and improvement items. If extreme clandestine circumstances are called for the items could be purchased from multiple different sources in different areas in cash over a period of time.

      Assembling these weapons requires only a few hand tools and the know how (which is pretty darn simple) If you can set up and run a 3d printer you’re already a lot more ingenious than the skill level of a hardware store IFA (Improvised Fire Arm).

      Access to a shop would allow the production of better and more efficient designs, but if the gun in this video is the current standard a much better weapon can be made with hand tools at the kitchen table already for far less money.

      The 3d printer might well revolutionize the concept, but then again, CNC machining basically uses the same software concept to make real guns out of real metal that really work and you can run one of those in a basement or garage all day. For the apartment dweller without access to machine tools the hardware store special is still better and more viable than the 3d printer, though over time and barring insurmountable technological barriers that will change to the printers advantage.

      I really wasn’t trying to downplay the printed weapons, rather suggesting that the ability to more cheaply, reliably and accessibly make IFAs in the home has already existed for at least 100 years.

      I suppose what I was saying was that until the technology matures there are better alternatives, and that the announcement of the death of the ability to ban firearms based on this flimsy offering is not only premature, but even absurd in light of the fact that better arms can more readily be created via other means.

  10. Out of curiosity, why not just make a metal barrel? Dont get me wrong, I appreciate the inginuity and realize the importance of this development.

    • It’s a proof of concept thing. You could make it out of metal, but you’d need the raw tube (or rod if you’re gonna bore it out yourself), and you’d need it at the rate of one linear foot of material per linear foot of barrel produced. These 3D printed guns are literally making something out of nothing. You start with a spool of plastic rod, several hundred feet long, and out of it you make anything. Several hundred feet of plastic on a roll, and I’d be surprised if this used more than 10 feet of it for this whole gun. Probably less. So your input to output ratio is tiny.

      • The concept and bennefits certainly are impressive. I havent seen the videos but have seen headlines for 3D printed dresses and even food. Im not sure how the latter works though. I hope Im around for the next two decades to see where this type of manufacturing will go.

      • Exactly what Matt said, he’s experimenting. Theoretically one could program up a design that accepts a metal barrel and chamber and instantly solve the most serious problems with the prototype in the video (barrel failure and casing extraction).

        Since I’ve been discussing hardware store specials, one could very well have a gun printed that accepted a pipe of a certain dimension and have a hybrid that was an improvement over both of the originals. (The fire control group of the printed gun and the barrel of the hardware store one.)

  13. Pretty cool, but you have a much more lenient definition of “doesn’t break” than I do. A cracked barrel sounds like a broken gun to me. Maybe “doesn’t break on the first shot this time” is too long for the headline, but much more accurate.

    Also, wouldn’t this be the world’s second 3D-printed rifle, since the first one broke?

    (I’m in a pedantic mood this evening.)

    • Two separate concepts stinkeye, it’s the world’s first printed rifle (design) and this iteration didn’t break as quickly as the other. Though pedantry is sometimes respected when it’s called for in this case artistic license and hyperbole are combined to create a pleasing headline. In fact, when writing headlines for publication some degree of grandstanding is considered admirable.

      Nothing to see here, carry on.

  14. Let’s definitely keep feeding the 3D printer hysteria, before The Man starts cracking down on actual machine shops and their evil tools.

    • You got that NCG. Once upon a time in a land far, far away I knew a man who’d spent his long life as a machinist. Over the years he’d acquired an impressive collection of tools in his basement as well as the skills and vision to use them.
      He was a self taught engineer and a highly skilled machinist. Once when I was yet a tadpole I observed the things he could wrought in metal. I asked him what it was about guns that made them so hard to make. He thought a moment and said that they weren’t nearly as difficult to make as many of the things he’d machined in his long career. A barrel a chamber, a lock and a striker, really so simple that apprentice machinists ought to be able to churn them out regularly.
      Oh sure I said, A black powder muzzle loader, but what about this? Here I presented my 1911. He smiled in his grandfatherly way and said that if I’d leave it with him a couple of weeks he’d make it’s clone. I took the challenge.
      It took 6 weeks, and lots of refits and testing but in the end this machinist created a working 1911 from steel billets. He produced the slide and receiver, the barrel, hammer and most of the internals. He bought the springs but that is hardly cheating since springs are forever dual purpose.
      He had deleted the grip and external safeties, the series 80 pin detent, the sights, a large portion of the slide (he’d actually reworked the plunger and bushing to something easier to make. But despite the alterations and substitutions it looked like an alien representation of a 1911.
      It was another month or so before it would shoot reliably, but in fullness it would pump out 7 rounds as fast as the trigger was pulled without failure. It was hideously inaccurate due to its oversized smooth bore and lack of sights, but there it was, a working 1911 made in a basement by a non gunsmith machinist.
      I submit that had he taken a 6 week gunsmithing course, or just had advice from someone who had the workings of the thing down better than I did back then he’d have done it in half the time with twice the success. I also know that if he had produced another it would have been finer in every way and he could have made it in a night.
      The prototype was destroyed by its maker, against my vehement objections, as being ‘inherently unsafe’. The old fellow is long past now, but his effort taught me that making guns is not a fanciful undertaking, though making quality ones might well be.

  16. Crank out another prototype and test it with Aguilla Super Colibri ammo, just to scare the crap out of the anti’s with easier extraction resulting in rapid rates of fire, and low wear…

    Who cares if it’s relatively powerless, it’ll look scary. And print it out of black ABS… every gun is scarier when it’s black.

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