Do you need a manufacturer's license?

Not for a Form 1 can. Pay the $200 tax and the approved Form 1 is your manufacturer's license, so to speak, but it's only good for that one can with its own unique serial number.

The trick with ABS is you have to have and totally enclosed build chamber, I heat the build plate to 110° C and with a full enclosure the ambient temperature gets up to about 40-50° C. If I could figure out a way to keep the steppers cool, I'd force heat the chamber even hotter. Without doing those this ABS is a waste of time. I recommend maker geeks hi-temp Raptor PLA for genreal use, it doesnt warp, and it sands and bends a bit unlike normal pla

Damn, I can't think of a higher honor at this site.

Where'd you upload? Thingiverse?

Solidworks can convert to STL which is read by the slicer and converted to gcode.

There might be OBJ compatibility too, not sure though

Either polycarbonate or bridge nylon could possibly withstand that pressure though I'm just guessing.

As others have mentioned though, once it's deregulated then prices have to fall dramatically. If prices don't drop substantially, then the existing companies will get their asses handed to them by the first start up that creates a half assed safe and effective suppressor at a reduced price.

Banning polymer suppressors by govt, or simply at ranges,won't accomplish anything. And polymer suppressors will continue to improve with community knowledge and materials knowledge. Further , at some point in the future metal infused prints and straight metal dust prints will be more available for the hobbyist and so more suppressors will be made at home.

I don't quite understand why you seem to be crusading against this ,as it seems to be without reason.

Totally get your point about the differences in .22 and centerfire, but it doesn't mean all else is impossible

housing the printed core in a serialized threaded tube would be a prudent next step

Hmmm, I have a Flashforge Pro...

Yup.

For those of you that aren't familiar with it, tons of shit that people have drawn up and posted for people to print.
http://www.thingiverse.com/

There is a bunch of goofy shit, but there are some very neat, creative, and useful things also. Everything under the sun.

Was patching up smoked hdd late sun night to avoid the mon morn panic. Needed a 3.5 to 2.5 hdd adapter.
There were quite a few options on there so all I had to do was d/l the file and fire up the printer. No witching hour walmart run needed

Here at gd, you guys might be more interested to know that they make flexible (soft) filaments in many colors.
One could print their own fleshlights (or dildos) if one were so inclined

Geebus, whered yall go?  1st time i seen peeps here  get skert of dildos and fleshlights

I saw a video showing how two guys from SpaceX modeled the new Raptor engine, and their kung-fu was good enough to solve combustion instability. They would consider designing a good suppressor trivial.

Yes. A guy at the hackerspace I go to uses SolidWorks and prints things he designed on it.

I was able to get Bridge Nylon print on my Monoprice Mini by blocking off the parts cooling fan and keeping the bed hot.

ABS, nylon, and polycarbonate (lexan. Yes, you can print bulletproof shit1!!) are notoriously difficult to print because of the heat expansion thing.
The guys that struggle with it are usually the guys that thought they would just plug a spool of awesomeness in and didn't do their homework.
It really isn't that bad when you get learned and take the (little) extra steps needed to ensure it works out.

Wicked cool!

Now just pass the HPA and we could be swimming in sub $10 suppressors!

That one might be a little optimistic for 3d printing, but it would happen when somebody with access to an injection molder spent the afternoon making a set of dies. PA66 GF33 would prob do better than any filament you could buy for a printer.

Fuck muh r&d and roi, it would only take a sat afternoon to draw up and cut dies that would spit out thousands of disposable muzzle devices for piss money.

I've taken to encloseing the ultimaker when printing PLA.  My problem stems from the vendor's stating their systems print ABS as the machine is shipped from the factory.   We enclosed our MakerBot to get better prints.  I've hacked a cube x so I could use our own slicer and filament instead of the proprietary crap.

edited for spelling, f-ing autocorrect

Yeah I don't of any consumer grade printers that are actually ready to make quality turn key ABS prints.

I've turned to Makergeeks' hi-temp pla for most stuff now, it doesn't warp, it's tough and flexible, good layer adhesion, and sands nicely. Makergeeks' Raptor Series PLA

Man that's awesome

Good work

My Stratasys waits patiently...

3D printed fleshlights. Now we're talking

Hypothesis:  You could even use the polymer's fragile nature to the benefit of performance.

Muzzle pop is due to rapid expansion, which is driven by pressure differential between the propellant gasses and the atmosphere.  The easiest way to reduce the pressure is to reduce the temperature, which is the primary mechanism of action of a suppressor (along with increasing the time/impulse of venting, gas mixing, and other factors).

Metal suppressors are limited in terms of performance because the gas can only transfer so much energy to the can, and the gas inside, in the limited time available.  They also can't have terribly complex internal geometries, because of course it does need to be manufactured.  There's also (currently) a strong concern for durability, because stamps are time consuming and expensive.

To improve the performance of a traditional suppressor, you can use an ablative like water or wire-pulling gel.  These arrest sparks and solid matter within the combustion products, and the phase change consumes a great deal of thermal energy.

However, ablatives must be applied to the suppressor before use, they can leak and cause similar problems, they're generally inconvenient, and they don't offer all that much of a performance increase to make it worth it for the average shooter, except for novelty purposes here and there.


But...

What if a 3d printed can were designed with a very complex internal geometry, which maximized surface area inside?  You have more effective heat transfer, which is an obvious advantage.  But, within that complex geometry you create many nearly-sealed pockets, breached only by small pinholes.  After printing, the can is submerged in wire-pulling gel, and the tank pressurized to force the gel into the cavities through the pinholes.  Then you centrifuge the excess gel out, so you're left with a can that handles, stores, attaches, etc. without any mess, but which contains a goodly bit of gel stored inside the many small pockets.  The gel is simply too viscous to exit through the pinholes under atmospheric pressure.

When fired, some of the polymer will melt away.  This consumes a tiny bit of energy, but what it really does is to expose the gel contained within the cavities.  With successive shots, more cavities/gel are exposed as the can wears away.

The result is improved performance, perhaps even over a traditional metallic can, longer life as the gel also helps keep the polymer cool, and lower risk of fire or baffle strikes from can heat/droop/etc.  A pressurized tank of gel and a rudimentary centrifuge aren't adding much in the way of expense to the manufacturing cost.  You're still well below the cost of a single box of ammo for the whole can, which makes them pretty disposable once all the cavities/gel are consumed (which could simply be determined by perceived performance, or by weight).

This is 1 1/2 x7", weighs 11 ozs and costs 75 bucks. 90 bucks for the 9 inch model and 50 bucks for a 1x5" rimfire model. No cheap freeze plugs either, it's all machined from 6061.

If HPA passes, I expect these prices to be even lower.

Well.  Good point. 

LOL @ all the people who still think cans will be expensive if the HPA passes. 

Legally no, but practically yes. He'd simply keep his big mouth shut. 

Inconel is expensive no matter what the law says

You don't, if HPA passes and it's just a range toy. 

You don't need your can to last forever if you don't have the burden of the NFA.  

When people find out the trade off in dB and life for a cheaper can with stamped stainless baffles I think those will be much more common than high end cans.

They're probably more common now.  But there will always be a market for that kind of product.

See the $425 cast iron pan thread for proof

LOL 

Slightly OT - has anyone done an additive manufacturing lathe yet?  In my mind current 3D printers are basically the additive version of a mill.  One could do the same thing with a lathe, starting with some type of core onto which material is deposited.  The big difference would be that the part could be radially assymetrical, as the nozzle could be timed with the rotation. 

Ive though about something akin to a fdm lathe, more of a polar coordinate machine, a center rotational axis with radial and height linear axis.

Before computers, lathes were an easy way to make nice round things.
With cnc, lathes are no longer really needed, but are still better suited to some operations.

A lathe printer would be a neat project, but not sure what it would do that a normal one wouldn't.

Lots of files on thingi, which one is the OP's?

I wasn't talking about metal at all. 

Probably for some operations it would be substantially faster.  If you had a section that didn't require interrupted filament deposition, you could then speed up the workpiece past what the rotary encoder could normally handle.  Then when the thickness of that deposit gets close to final, ramp the rotation speed back down until the encoder becomes useful again.

Mechanically, they can already run way faster than what you can actually print at.
You can only melt plastic so fast and have it stick. Also need time between passes to let the previous layer firm up, or weird shit happens.

If you added a 4th axis, might be able to print some things that you could not otherwise. Doubt there is firmware or slicers that support this though.
You always need something for it to print on. Vertical walls are easy, but something flat and/or unsupported is a bit trickier.
The zig zaggy stuff in timkels mag well is a temporary support so the other side of the mag well has something to rest on as it prints.
It just pops out when it is finished.

Those complex internal geometries would be easily accomplished by an SLA printer, but I'm not certain the materials available for SLA printing are as strong as some others available.

I've seen rotation on the metal "printers."

Offtopic but apparently here's a 3D printed metal 1911:

Here's an LMD printer that uses rotation. Kinda neat:

There was a german machine I saw on the youtubes last year that was (I believe) a mix of CNC/LMD. It would lay the metal dust down and heat it with a laser to "print" an object, then do a tool swap and begin milling the part to shape, then add more material, then mill, and on and on until it had a finished carburetor. But now I can't find it. My youtube-fu is bad

ETA: link fix

Well, if we get the HPA passed, count me in on 3d shenanigans.  I've got just over a foot of build volume on my machine

Someone said it, this was my idea. Make a serialized tube that the enclosed baffle assembly slides or screws in to. Bonus points if the threaded barrel part stays on the tube so the replacement baffle assemblies are swappable in seconds.

I've seen a 5 axis Mori seki used with a LENs additive setup as a tool in the tool magazine.  So powder metal is injected by air into a weld pool created by a laser.   It builds up metal for a while, then parks the laser head in the corner of the machine enclosure.  Pulls a cutting  tool from the tool magazine and machines like normal.  Puts the tools away and reattached laser head and powder injection device.   The target use was to rebuild worn areas in expensive parts and remachine them to spec instead of totally replacing the parts.  They show complete builds in the videos

I'm not sayin.........but I'm just sayin.......

I wasnt aware 29P had been officially promulgated as a rule yet.

They pay ITAR taxes to sell stuff like that