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Watch a 3D-Printed Handgun Fire 9 Rounds

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Just a couple of weeks after Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed released the files for the world’s first 3D-printed handgun, imitators have already replicated and improved upon it. Two gunsmiths from Wisconsin successfully fired their own Liberator nine times, without the gun showing any damage. As first reported by Forbes, two engineers, Michael Guslick and a man who refers to himself as “Joe” — he didn’t want to reveal his name — printed their version of the Liberator on a relatively cheap and unsophisticated 3D printer. Unlike Wilson, who used a $8,000 Stratasys, the Wisconsin duo used a consumer-grade $1,725 Lulzbot AO-101. They printed all the pieces within 48 hours and spent a paltry $25 in materials. “People think this takes an $8,000 machine and that it blows up on the first shot. I want to dispel that,” Joe told Forbes. “This does work, and I want that to be known.” As the video shows, the Lulz Liberator is functional — but making it so was trickier than it may appear. When the Guslick and Joe tested the “Lulz Liberator” last week, using .380 caliber rounds, the barrel snapped on the first try. But that barrel was actually printed on a Stratasys 3D printer owned by Guslick. He explained that the initial failure was “due to a compressed load and resulting cartridge overpressure.” Then the Wisconsin engineers used a barrel printed with Joe’s Lulzbot. The gun fired nine times over the course of the test — with its components remaining intact. The gun might have sustained even more shots, but the men decided to stop the test because of poor light conditions. Guslick, who was one of the first gunsmiths to experiment with 3D printing, wrote in an email to Mashable that it wasn’t easy to fire the handgun successfully. “The Liberator is actually a very finicky gun at this point,” he wrote. “We had many more times that it went ‘click’ rather than ‘bang.’” Guslick explained that for various reasons, the gun failed to fire with both barrels and even failed between successful shots. The main problem was the shape of the firing pin, which “appears to be crucial for operation,” he wrote. In fact, sometimes the firing pin wouldn’t hit the primer “dead-center,” and it required “several strikes” to ignite, Guslick wrote. Since Joe and Guslick didn’t use the firing pin retainer, a part of the original Liberator design, they lost a lot of firing pins and had to add replacements after each successful shot. The body screws bent from the recoil, which made more replacements necessary. Regardless, this is another step toward making functioning plastic guns more accessible to anybody with an Internet connection and a 3D printer, even a relatively cheap one. And it’s a step toward making those guns more efficient; maybe even deadlier. UPDATE, May 21, 11:50 a.m.: The story has been updated to clarify the issues that Guslick and Joe had with the firing pin. Images and video courtesy of Michael Guslick Read […]

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MakerBot CEO: no new hardware at CES

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MakerBot CEO Jenny LawtonJenny Lawton took a somewhat circuitous route to the helm of 3D printing leader MakerBot. Before joining the company as “Head of People” in 2011, Lawton spent ten years in retail, running her own bookstore in Greenwich, Connecticut. And though physical book selling might appear the polar opposite of 3D printing, which takes digital ideas and makes them physical, Lawton told me she learned a lot in the “down and dirty” retail business. “Retail is tough, tough work,” said Lawton and her bookstore taught her valuable lessons about small business, inventory management and the critical nature of customer relations. Lawton was able to layer that knowledge on top of a rather rich and impressive background in startups and technology. The 51 year old Quantico, Virginia, native studied applied math at Union College before going to work at the MIT in the late 1980s. In 1991, Lawton (along with Christopher Caldwell) launched the Web consulting firm Net Daemon Associates and rode the Internet wave (they created Monster.com) and subsequent bubble right up to the 1999 burst when Lawton sold the company to Interliant. After that, Lawton spent a couple of years in venture capital. Then 9/11 happened. It was, for Lawton, a pivotal experience. She been living what she called a “a go-go” lifestyle. After the terrorists attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania, Lawton took stock and thought, “Hey, there’s a different way to do this.” Her love of reading led her to buy the bookstore and build it into a community based service. “I can’t tell you how cool it is to turn a kid onto reading.” A different passion Now, however, Lawton is turned on by the sound of 3D printers and whenever she gets to bring kids into her home to show them any of her five 3D printers in action. She’s also excited about the future of MakerBot, even if the short term does not include new 3D printing hardware. “I am happy to say that we’re not going to be launching new hardware products at CES,” said Lawton sounding gleeful. She told me that MakerBot introduced five new products at CES 2014, including a giant $7,000 3D printer capable of printing 10 objects at once. All that hardware leaves MakerBot with lots of work to do on many fronts, including solidifying the ecosystem and polishing the projects that are still just rolling out to customers (the mini started shipping in May.) “We really feel like they need time in the market. Next year is not the year of hardware: Focus on ecosystem and material space,” said Lawton. In other words, MakerBot’s new smart extruder will likely take the company well beyond printing with tradition 3D printing materials like the biodegradable PLC. Growing up A little more than a year ago, MakerBot was acquired by another 3D printing company, Stratasys. Little has changed since then, with the notable exception of the company leadership. Over the summer, MakerBot Co-Founder and CEO Bre Pettis […]

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How 3D Scanning Brought ‘BioShock Infinite’ to Life

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When Irrational Games needed to create a distinctive look to promote the female lead in the video game BioShock Infinite, it looked to 3D scanning rather than traditional modeling software. The game’s leading lady, Elizabeth Comstock, is one of the most original and engaging digital characters in years, and her realistic appearance in a commercial for the game revealed how effectively the technology can convey facial features and emotions. Elizabeth’s in-game design came from a traditional combination of motion-capture for her body and 3D modeling for her face, but Irrational needed a face for Elizabeth in the promotional materials — billboards, print and online ads and even TV spots. As the game neared its release in March, Irrational knew that Elizabeth would have to grab the audience’s attention right away, and set about crafting a TV commercial for the game. Elizabeth’s expressive face and realistic features come by way of an Artec 3D scanner: a professional-grade product made by a startup company in Moscow. “Our scanners are a little different,” Anna Zevelyov, Artec 3D Scanning’s director of business development, told TechNewsDaily. “Actually, they’re a lot different!” Whereas most professional-grade 3D scanners rest on a tripod and require a person to move them around an object very slowly, Artec’s scanner is handheld and operates like a video camera. “You take it in your hand, you walk around the object, and you capture it at 16 [frames per second],” Zevelyov said. “It automatically aligns all the strains together to create a single object in 3D.” The Artec scanners’ size and rapidity make them a natural fit for capturing human subjects, Zevelyov said. “Humans can’t stand still very long,” she added. Irrational Games sought out Anna Moleva, a popular Russian cosplayer — someone who dresses up as characters from pop culture for conventions or photo shoots — to represent Elizabeth in the commercial. As a Russian scanning company, Artec was a natural fit. “This beautiful young Russian woman came by and she was posing,” Zevelyov explained. “We scanned her here and sent the scans to Los Angeles. They did all the postproduction on it; they made her come to life.” “We made her do a bunch of faces,” Zevelyov said. “Here she is angry, here she is sad, here she is laughing, here she is frowning … Once [artists] get these scans, they don’t have to imagine what she might look like, because they’ve never seen her.” Zevelyov estimates the whole scanning session took, at most, 20 minutes — a far cry from the eight-plus hours it can often take designers to create a face from scratch. Without 3D scanning, making a face for a video game character can be an arduous process, to say nothing of animating it or connecting it to a moveable body. “It takes [designers] about four hours to draw a face, and another four hours to draw the texture and color of the face, and the shape,” Zevelyov said. “Let’s say they want to digitize Brad Pitt,” she […]

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