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The Freedom Fighter Shotgun: Building an improvised shotgun using parts from the hardware store eBook: Christian Armstrong, Morticai Armstrong: leondumoulin.nl
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California state senator Kevin Deleon introduced a bill to ban ghost guns last year, following the Santa Monica mass shooting. Governor Jerry Brown vetoed it a few months later. But as the shouting match over ghost guns gets louder, few of the shouters have actually tried to make one. Here's how it all went down.

The drill press, jigs and vise I used in my first attempt to finish an 80 percent lower receiver.

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Remember when I said I know nothing about using power tools? Unsurprisingly, this portion of my gunsmithing experiment didn't go well.


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Step one: Acquire a drill press, a massive stand-alone drill meant to cut the aluminum features out of my 80 percent-lower receiver. All that planning and spending, it turned out, couldn't compensate for my utter lack of even high-school-level shop skills. Then there was the drilling itself—which, it would turn out, is not as easy as it looks on the Internet. I reviewed my lower-receiver drilling basics on YouTube one last time, put on latex gloves and eye protection, screwed the steel jigs around my slug of aluminum, tightened the clamps, and hit the chunky green power button.

As the drill bit chewed into the block, I felt a rush of excitement and tasted fine aluminum dust between my teeth. The bit threw off metal shavings and left behind a gleaming, polished crater.

But my elation faded as I realized how badly I was mangling the trigger well. No matter how hard I cinched it down, the vise shuddered constantly, moving the aluminum piece. The holes I was cutting veered off until they were practically diagonal. When I switched to the end mill to clean up the spaces between the pits I'd created, I found they were mostly at different depths: The drill bit had somehow moved up and down, and I hadn't noticed.

The bottom of the cavity I'd made began to resemble the surface of the moon. Meanwhile, the massive machine protested loudly, shaking like a train about to derail. Throughout this ordeal, WIRED video producer Patrick Farrell, a former bike mechanic who probably could have offered helpful advice, watched me struggle from behind his camera with a restrained smirk. The unwritten rule: I was in this alone.

I kept at it for five and a half hours. Then the head of the drill press—the part that holds the bit, which I'd later learn is called the "chuck"—fell off. I screwed the chuck back in, and after a few more minutes of metal-on-metal violence, it dropped off again.

That's when I gave up. I had nothing to show for my labor but a sad metal block scarred by a maze of crooked channels. Well, that and a left hand bristling with tiny aluminum shards where my latex glove had split. It felt like the elevator was a time machine shortcutting about a century of technological progress. I plugged in the 3-D printer, followed a series of delightfully idiotproof instructions, and in minutes was test-printing a tiny white coffee table.

Soon I was ready to start making gun parts; no obscure YouTube instruction videos, calipers, jigs, or aluminum splinters required. It was one of dozens of gun parts available for download in the rogue BitTorrent repository's "physibles" section , a part of the site presciently created in to host controversial digital blueprints other sites wouldn't or couldn't.

In fact, the file I downloaded had been created by Defense Distributed in , but the group had pulled it from its own website after the State Department threatened to prosecute the group's staff for weapons-export-control violations. It took a few minutes to torrent the lower receiver file. I opened it in Makerbot's printing application, centered it on the app's digital representation of the machine's print bed, and clicked print.

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As the workday ended and WIRED's office emptied, I found myself sitting alone in a darkening room, transfixed by the gun component slowly materializing before me. At one point, six hours into the nine-hour print job, the Replicator's print head overheated and took some time to cool down. That required pressing one more button on the machine. I didn't touch it again. The next morning I came back to the still-dark room and found a finished, eerily translucent lower receiver glowing inside the Replicator's LED-lit chamber.

As science-fictional as that process felt, the results were flawed. When I pried the finished lower receiver off the print bed, one side was covered in support material meant to prevent the hot plastic structures from collapsing before they solidified. Snapping and scraping off that matrix of plastic was a long, messy process. I tried using a knife, cut my thumb, and bled all over one side of the rifle body.

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And the same support materials also filled tiny holes in the piece, in some cases choking the delicate threads meant to accept metal screws. It's clearly possible, based on YouTube evidence, to 3-D-print AR lower receivers that are capable of firing hundreds of rounds. But mine wasn't so practical; I wouldn't know it until I visited a gunsmith two days later, but I'd eventually give up on assembling a gun out of that plastic-printed lower receiver long before it was anywhere close to a becoming a functional weapon.

But from my first moments using the Ghost Gunner, it was clear: This is a machine designed to make a gun.

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As if to underscore the power contained in its microwave-sized footprint, the machine was so heavy I could barely lift it from its box. When I did haul it onto a table, I was struck by the lack of branding or the toylike LED lights and buttons of the Replicator. Its stark simplicity mirrors the unmarked gun parts it's designed to create. Eventually, it felt much more like the Ghost Gunner had programmed me to be its gun-making tool than vice versa.

The Ghost Gunner works with either of two pieces of software: GRBL, an open source, general-purpose milling application, and DDCut, a Windows-only gun-milling program created by Defense Distributed and recommended by the group for anyone other than advanced CNC mill users. Putting it on the Internet, as with the 3-D-printable files, might have prompted the State Department to threaten Defense Distributed with prosecution again for weapons-export-control violations.

I installed DDCut and found that for its primary purpose of finishing a lower receiver, the Ghost Gunner is absurdly easy to use—mostly because I was never given the chance to make any choices. Once DDCut began running the AR file and cutting into my 80 percent-lower receiver, my only interaction with the software was clicking "next" through a step set of instructions and then doing things to the aluminum part that the software told me to do. For one hour-long stretch in that process, I was given nothing to do but simply admire the Ghost Gunner as its blurred, cylindrical blade cut away the gun's trigger well with inhuman precision.

At other times it seemed to alternate between carving aluminum and assigning me tasks like changing the lower receiver's position, tightening and loosening bolts, switching the end mill to a drill bit, or even vacuuming up the aluminum shavings that piled up in and around the machine. Over those hours, I couldn't help but appreciate the beauty of the Ghost Gunner's design and engineering. As it patiently removed metal, the aluminum piece and the cutting tool moved in robotic, mesmerizing patterns.

The noises the machine produced alternated between high-pitched shrieking and low groans that echoed through the WIRED newsroom and elicited complaints from neighbors. But during quieter lulls, the Ghost Gunner also emitted a series of rising and falling harmonics, produced by vibrations of the mill's stepper motors, that sounded like a kind of alien melody. My editor, Joe Brown, who came into the room to watch the machine at work, remains convinced the machine was programmed to play a piece of composed music.

When it was only three steps away from finishing its full process, however, the Ghost Gunner hit a serious snag. The probe the mill uses to measure the lower receiver's location malfunctioned, and the machine locked itself. To get it moving again, I had to break the rules of my experiment and call Cody Wilson, Defense Distributed's founder, to seek advice. At first he told me I'd have to rerun the entire process—close to four hours of wasted time.

But Wilson soon came up with a better plan and sent me a new file that rehearsed only the last portion of the AR cutting process. Twenty minutes later I pulled from the machine the shining, perfect body of a semiautomatic rifle, as warm as if it were some baked good fresh from the oven.

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The Ghost Gunner's lower receiver looked obviously superior to my 3-D-printed one—and even more obviously superior to the hot mess of uneven aluminum I'd chewed up with the drill press. But before assembling the full weapon, I wanted an expert opinion. So I visited Bay Area Gunsmithing, a sunny garage in Novato, California, populated by two professional gunsmiths, a very impressive collection of ordnance, and a gracefully aging dachshund named Ruth.

When I showed my manually drilled lower receiver to Nathan Rynder, the shop's owner, he dismissed it immediately. The hammer and trigger wouldn't fit into the narrow, winding gorge of the trigger well I'd created, and I hadn't even gotten as far as drilling holes for the selector and trigger pins. He did note that he'd seen worse attempts, including a customer who had brought him a lower receiver with a gaping, unintended orifice drilled through its side. I was more surprised when Rynder insulted my 3-D-printed lower receiver.

He pointed out that the blueprint had misplaced something called a "takedown pin hole," and he made a further to-do list of necessary fixes before it could be assembled. Just the idea of a 3-D-printed lower receiver bothered him; if the ring that held on the buffer tube and stock the big loop at the back of the receiver were to break, he pointed out, it could unleash a large and powerful spring inches from the shooter's face.

Building an untraceable AR with the Ghost Gunner is pricier than it would be with a traditional drill press. But it requires far less skill than that manual method and costs less than creating the gun with a typical 3-D printer.