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purchased parts. The main body of the gun was plastic but the chamber that
held the bullets was metal.
Haveblue reported online that the printed plastic gun parts were robust
enough that he was able to ire 200 rounds. No special equipment was needed.
The gun parts were printed on a fairly old Stratasys machine using normal
commercial-grade resin. The gun's creator estimated that it cost about $30 to
buy the resin to print the gun parts.
2
It was always possible to make your own gun, but 3D printers are the ideal
tool for tech-savvy criminals. A 3D printer creates objects shaped in ways that
were once impossible to make by hand or by machine, for example, a gun that
looks like shoe or a hairbrush. 3D printers are small and portable. They can
make one custom object after another, in stealth, no factories, coordination
or unnecessary exposure needed.
Counterfeiting and crime—like mainstream manufacturing and design
industries—are made more eficient and innovative by new technologies.
Illegal arms trading is big business. So is drug traficking.
Designer drugs
Maybe someday you will tell your grandchildren about the old days when
people had to have a doctor prescribe them certain drugs and you had to
get security clearance to buy dangerous chemicals. “Really?” your enthralled
listeners would exclaim, their eyes wide.
“Yes,” you would nod. “That was way back before the days of DIY chemical
factories.”
In an article by writer Nikki Olson, Lee Cronin, a professor at the University
of Glasgow, described his most recent project, a mini chemistry lab built
on a low-cost 3D printer. Lee Cronin and his team used an open-source
printer (Fab@home) to print a mini chemical factory, or what they describe
as “reactionware.”
Reactionware is a polymer gel whose internal structures contain vessels
that give it a special shape that enables chemical reactions to take place. Like
a glass test tube that remains aloof from the chemical action that takes place
inside of it, reactionware offers a neutral environment that enables chemical
reactions to take place undisturbed. Cronin and team tapped into the preci-
sion and digital control of 3D printing to fabricate a custom gel containing
intricate vessels that can catalyze chemical reactions at a much lower cost.
