It’s no secret that I have a penchant for oddball guns, be they paintball marker or firearm. Seeing a design that’s off the beaten path is always enjoyable, be it for mechanical ingenuity or sheer impractical novelty (though usually a peculiar blend of both). During a recent visit to my friendly local FFL (always good […]
A friend had a Bushmaster rifle that they wanted to add a bipod to – unfortunately, the freefloating handguard has no provisions for mounting a bipod and even more, the handguard is integral to the barrel nut itself. Still, I’m always up for a challenge. To make things easier, I decided to leave the handguard/barrel […]
I realized it has been over a year since I last wrote on the subject (though to be fair, it seems it has been about that much time since I’ve written much of anything substantial). Since I last addressed the topic in March of 2013, the apex of the “3D printed gun” story has been […]
Well, to say that a lot has happened since Part 3 would be something of an understatement. To recap: Defense Distributed tried printing my AR lower STL on an Objet machine, but it only held up for 6 shots. While much was made in the media about this ‘failure’, I thought it was actually an […]
Last fall, my friend Max helped his mom pick out a shotgun for home defense. Being a fairly small lady, she took a liking to a youth model 20ga. Mossberg 500 and had a great time with it at the range. However, the 22″ barrel that came with it was a little long for a […]
To say that the buzz generated around this project is heavy on “media hype” would be an understatement. I could write a great deal on this alone, but I’ll content myself to refer people to David Chernicoff’s excellent article explaining why this is not a big deal and the apocalypse is not nigh. Being at […]
I know I’m not alone in having printed an AR-15 lower and test fitting it with internals – this fellow printed an upper to go with his printed lower, and another Thingiverse user just printed an AR-10 lower! I’d be pretty hesitant to use a printed lower with something as powerful as .308 (hence why […]
I’ve used my Stratasys to prototype out various ideas for paintball gun parts, but the concept of using it for actual firearm parts hadn’t really occurred to me until early last year. I first thought of making some dummy 12 gauge shells to test out the action on a Remington 870, and then thought of […]
A long-running project I’ve been tinkering with occasionally over the years has been machining an AR-15 lower receiver from scratch (or more precisely, a raw 0% forging). I’ve made a fair amount of progress thanks to the excellent video done by Frank Roderus (which is a great machining tutorial even if you have no interest […]