“You wouldn’t download a car, would you?” … yes. Yes. I WOULD. Not that we can 3d print cars just yet. but I would in a heart beat if I could.
I don’t trust a 3d printed gun, why would I trust a 3d printed car? But if I could make a car myself, I definitely would, even if I had to pirate the designs.
3d printed firearms have transformed into a whole cottage industry with all sorts of variations. The ones that are safest are essentially just stocks capable of holding the parts of a firearm. The ones that are completely 3d printed are still pretty sketchy and illegal to sell
Any firearm that you, a private citizen, manufacture, is illegal to sell.
You are not a licensed firearm distributor.
But, at least in most of the US, it is perfectly legal to manufacture them for your own use. You just can’t sell them.
The thing people forget is that 3d printing doesn’t just enable the direct manufacturing of parts, it also enables the manufacturing of tooling for parts that would never have been manufacturable at home otherwise.
For example, you can rifle a metal tube and form a chamber using electro etching and printed tooling. Or, you can make tooling to make magazine springs
The key point to be made here is that a fully plastic gun is sketchy but 3d printing has absolutely transformed the ability to make reliable and effective firearms at home without any off the shelf firearm parts
The same type of thing is happening in the car hobbyist world. We aren’t printing cars but people are using prints to make molds, form sheet metal, align parts for weldments and manufacture low stress plastic parts like intake manifolds.
reliable
Out of everything you said, this is the only thing that I disagree with, but it’s the only thing that matters. I mentioned 3d printed guns because, if you don’t use off the shelf parts, you really don’t have any way of knowing how many rounds you can put through it before it explodes in your hand. Was there a tiny defect in your print? A misalignment or some debris in the print material? You’re right that boring your chambers from stock is safer, but that doesn’t make it safe. And that’s a firearm you can inspect after each round.
A car has many critical components under the hood, especially when you use an internal combustion engine. That’s a bunch of tiny explosions every second, and even setting that aside, you have the transmission, the brakes, the steering, the windshield, the stereo, any one of those could fail and kill you (or make life not worth living, in the case of that last one).
3D printing will continue to evolve and improve, but it will be a long time before I trust it enough to download a car.
3d printing has come a long way, both in materials and quality. especially as you step away from FDM or resin printers. I certainly wouldn’t trust a rando facebook marketplace printer who bought a creality to make a quick buck… but I would trust my own prints- mostly because I know what the materials are, and know I’ll check for good print quality. reality is, though, that about the most you can print right now is a half baked golf cart chasis. if you want it to be safe… you’re going to have to add a lot to it, and at that point, you might as well just buy a damn car or something.
You wouldn’t download a car, would you?
Movies studios now trying to download actors.
Marcin Jakubowski is already doing this with Farming Equipment!
Borderlands lets you download a car, that’s the second best way of getting a car in the game
