Adopt the pace of Nature. Her secret is Patience
-- Waldo Emerson --
-- Waldo Emerson --
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Lots of fuss now about 3-D printed guns.
Ho hum.
The first problem is the printers.
I know some people who own home versions of 3-D printers. The small least expensive ones are more like toys, but cost a minimum of $1500. They don't work as well as those YouTube videos would lead you to think. You have to feed them plastic "ink", and if you think the cartridges for your regular printer are expensive....yeouch! The production machines you see on YouTube are horribly expensive. You're not going to find one in your neighbor's basement.
In some, the base moves, in some the print head moves, in some both move. This gives you a multitude of possible error points - the head clogs, the head burps, the belt moving the head or base slips slightly, and so on. There are a lot of misprints using up a lot of that precious plastic before you get a useable item.
The device has to be fed code describing the part to be printed. That's another big exposure. How much do you trust the folks who produced it? Those plans are also usually expensive, no matter how they are generated.
The second problem is the printed gun.
If the entire gun is 3-D printed, the slightest misprint/glitch could cause the gun to explode in your hand the first time you try to fire it. So how do you test it?
Shooting a standard bullet generates heat. Heat is not kind to plastic. So even if it has been demonstrated that it's well printed from good code with no burps, I would be afraid to attempt a second bullet.
Of course, this is all blather from my own head, and there may be no problem at all.
I wonder if soon we'll be seeing a lot of one-handed amateur gunsmiths.
Schadenfreude. Tee-hee!
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Have you heard about PC-Kus (sheesh - who named that)? The reason your hair eventually turns gray is that you build up hydrogen peroxide, which bleaches the hair in the roots. PC-Kus is a topical cream that converts (breaks up) hydrogen peroxide into hydrogen and water, allowing the previous color to return.
(The bad news is that the longer your hair has been gray/white, the less effective it is.)
The discovery was a byproduct of research on vitiligo, a condition that causes the loss of pigment in patches of skin.
Hmmmmm. The water probably won't be too great a problem, but one could hope that the tops of very vain people's heads might explode from a build-up of hydrogen.
More schadenfreude. Tee-hee!
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