A Translucent, .22 Glock? 3D Printing and Steel Rails

That’s sure what this looks like:

Where did it come from?

There’s a clue in the pictures, and it’s clearer if you look at this shot of the bare frame…

…bare frames….

…rendering…

…and print in progress.

Yeah, it’s a 3D printed Glock. Cue the media meltdown now.

Yes, it does shoot:

Of the test fire, Matt, the maker, wrote:

First test of the frame. Fired prob 10 rounds through it. No issues found with it as of yet. …I was on a schedule and had to leave pretty quick so I ran my tests real quick to see how it looked then took off.

The frame does depend on metal rail inserts, and the designer has promised to release the .stl files… after a frame rail redesign.

Responding to skepticism about the part strength, he wrote:

It would take a long time for the actual frame to brake. Nylon is incredibly strong and specifically this nylon I am using is very close, property-wise, to the nylon Glock uses in their frames and they don’t tend to break very often even after hundreds of thousands of rounds. The first thing to go on my frame would be the rear metal rails since they are held in by a strong glue but have shallow slots since there is not a lot of room back there. I am redesigning the print a bit to allow me to actually put solid, connected rails into it mid print to help alleviate the need for glue since it will always be the first failure point. I am also modifying the design to add rear nylon rails along with the metal ones because the combo of nylon and metal on the front is proving to be very resilient and precise vs the only metal rails in the rear.

…the easiest nylon I have ever worked with. I made the dehydrator they actually have on their site and that thing is amazingly good and cheap… then I just ran the nylon on the recommended settings and it was already pretty good then I just tweaked it a bit with calibration to get my printer zeroed in and that frame was printed with no issues at all, other than some minor warp when it cooled. And as a minimum 10 hour print it had a good amount of time to mess up.

He explains that the Nylon solves the single greatest bugbear of highly-stressed 3DP Fused Filament Fabrication parts, layer stratification and delamination:

Normally, yes, 3D printed would have a weakness in the layer adhesion. Nylon specifically though has incredibly good layer adhesion when printed properly. The times I have managed to break nylon parts they have never delaminated and always broke across laminations randomly. It is pretty much the way even an injection molded nylon part would break.

He’s not done:

The next iteration of the frame will be even better and will have an even longer potential life with no need for repair. I have identified a couple places that end up being a pain when its printed but don’t matter as much when injection molded, so I am working around them to make it specifically a solid 3D printable frame. I also have a few ideas for alternate frames based on the pistols in mass effect.

For more information:

Reddit thread on printed receiver with some details.
Reddit thread on firing tests (lots of idiots telling him it’s gonna ‘splode!). Most of the quotes are from there (the user’s name is mattxl).
Imgur page with the pictures in this thread (and more).
Taulman 910 nylon product page.

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