I'm a long-time lurker here. I don't think I've ever actually posted. I do have a story I thought you'd find entertaining.
Like many of you, after the shooting in Connecticut last December, I watched various politicians demonize guns with a mixture of anger and fear. I started looking around for firearms parts only to find that everyone else was doing the same thing, and there was very little to be found. I was able to find a parts kit and the other parts to build up the last lower receiver I had lying around and ordered another cheaper upper that was eventually delivered in May or June.
Then I started looking for accessories. And watching the initial attempts of Defense Distributed to print a working 30-round magazine for an AR. A friend and I said, "Those can't be THAT hard to make." So naturally, we got started.
We grabbed all the magazines we had, all the blueprints of ARs and magazines we could find online, and started cad'ing them up. We did our first few prototypes on an SLA machine to much greater success than we had initially envisioned. We actually had our second round design, with which we later demonstrated a 30-round dump, before DD posted their video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1U5rEAUD4EThis was in the height of the crisis, and naturally word got around that some local guys were successfully 3D printing magazines, including the owner of the range where we had been testing and a rather large local distributor. All they wanted to know was how fast we could make them. At this point, we realized that this could be a viable business. As a bonus, maybe we could keep Feinstein and Schumer up a night. So we started looking in to actually injection molding and assembling them.
Prototype round 3:
After tossing far more money in to this than we had anticipated, we had tooling. And issues with the first shots out of the tool. We spent lots of time painstakingly modifying the tool and testing magazines out of it until we got it right. Testing is expensive with ammo at panic prices. A couple thousand rounds all of a sudden becomes a major purchase. Plastics used in the actual magazines have some very different properties than those used in SLA machines, so we got to learn far more about how these things actually work. Through friends, we found the Louisiana Association for the Blind, a local organization that employs blind people to do assembly tasks. They primarily do paper products for government agencies, but were happy to have another local customer. And they're damn good at it.
Tooling:
Dialing in the molding process:
Rather pretty:
Base plates, fresh out of the tooling.
Testing:
Testing:
More testing:
Packaging:
Magazines packed and awaiting delivery:
And that's the abbreviated story of how I went from being an avid hobbyist to a manufacturer of magazines. Now, who said you can't do manufacturing in America any more?
