Technology, 3d Printer | featured news

A Texas group run by a self-described anarchist has posted what appears to be the first video of the live firing of a handgun created with a 3-D printer. The 53-second video shows a single shot being fired from The Liberator, a plastic handgun that, with the exception of its metal firing pin, was assembled from parts made with a 3-D printer, according to Defense Distributed. The gun appears unscathed after the test firing, although the brief clip does not reveal anything about its range or accuracy.

The company that developed 3D printed gun parts has announced plans to launch a new firm, dedicated to copyright-free blueprints for a range of 3D printable objects. Defcad, as the firm will be known, has already been dubbed the Pirate Bay of 3D printing. The site will become a "search engine for 3D printing," according to its founders.

In his State of the Union address last week, along with the standard calls for education reform and energy independence, President Obama gave a shout-out to a growing technology. In a lab in Youngstown, Ohio, the president said, “Workers are mastering the 3-D printing that has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost anything.”

When Ford wants to try out a new transmission part, an engineer sends a digital blueprint of the component to a computer, and what happens next once seemed like the stuff of science fiction.

The Designjet 3D is based on Stratasys's Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) technology, which turns three-dimensional CAD drawings into tangible prototypes by extruding partially molten ABS plastic in extremely fine layers one atop the other, forming the entire 3-D model in a single piece from the ground up.