3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: or !functionalprint@fedia.io
There are CAD communities available at: !cad@lemmy.world or !freecad@lemmy.ml
No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
No porn (NSFW prints are acceptable but must be marked NSFW)
No Ads / Spamming / Guerrilla Marketing
Do not create links to reddit
If you see an issue please flag it
No guns
No injury gore posts
If you need an easy way to host pictures, https://catbox.moe/ may be an option. Be ethical about what you post and donate if you are able or use this a lot. It is just an individual hosting content, not a company. The image embedding syntax for Lemmy is 
Moderation policy: Light, mostly invisible
You can make a crude firearm/hand held pipe bomb with a pipe and lighter. A lot less effort than 3d printing one.
Are they going to go after builders merchants now?
They can arrest Home Depot for intent to distribute.
Plumbers and carpenters are now felons.
Next they'll be looking at the violent motherfucker that invented 3d printing. Plus fishing supply companies that produce a different kind of, but still a, filament. /s
Might as well go after the smelters for making the metal that goes into knives and guns.
Sure Some people take the filament to the sea to murder fish for sushi lovers. But the real purpose is to 3D print unimaginable violent content.
This will get tossed. But here's why it's actually happening:
Gatalog and Polymaker both market through a network of influencers “specializing in 3D printed ghost gun content, as well as companies and individuals that illegally distribute [digital firearm manufacturing codes],” according to the suits.
Both also directly target state residents: Gatalog advertises a “California Compliant Glock 19-based Carbine kit,” while Polymakers’ website features Proposition 65 warnings and state-specific privacy opt-out features.
I mean yea, advertise your filament with YouTubers making guns, and you put yourself in the...oof.
Yeah people too easy to judge instead of reading the actual article. Despite the article being click baity, seems a pretty reasonable reason to sue polymaker. They should do little bit of research on who they choose to sponsor.
I'm not a gun guy but from my understanding of ghost guns you pretty much buy the whole gun online in parts, and you just 3d print a handle.
So I don't understand why people are so afraid of 3d printing when it really has minimal to do with the final product. From what I can tell you can't just 3d print a gun from start to finish like its a llm. You still have to buy the actual gun parts from the manufacturer. To me this sounds completely unrelated and like a issue with regulating gun parts.
You can carve a handle out of soap, wood, or buy a solid chunk of plastic and its the same result.
The problem is that, legally speaking, the lower receiver is the gun. So you can buy all the other parts online with no background check etc.
A person with a machine shop and knowledge on how to use it could also do this
The problem is that, legally speaking, the lower receiver is the gun. So you can buy all the other parts online with no background check etc.
Makes you wonder if there's a more sensible way to classify things legally... Probably not.
My biggest problem with all these attacks on 3d printing is that what you are talking about is completely legal as far as I am aware. There are tons of places online that sell partial receiver blanks that require the buyer to do the last few bits of machining and turn a "block of metal" into a "gun", legally speaking. It is currently completely legal for an individual in the US to build a gun without telling anyone about it for personal use so long as the final result does not run afoul of ant NFA rules (like automatic fire, length of shotgun, caliber size, etc.). They don't start doing anything illegal until they sell them, or even give them away (again, assuming they meet all of the NFA rules - obviously someone making themselves a gun has a high risk of running foul of the myriad of rules here, but the end result has to be evaluated to determine if they broke the law or not).
So all of these are just using gun terror as an attack vector against 3d printing in general. Just like the "think of the children" campaigns all over the world that are really just about stripping us of privacy and security. The guns aren't the real problem and neither are the kids. A free, private, and secure populace is the problem.
I am not advocating that people build their own guns. I am not a lawyer. I advise anyone go learn your local laws and discuss with actual legal counsel before choosing to attempt anything that could be against federal firearm law. kthx
To me this is so weird.
On one hand you have the gun nuts blocking any meaningful reform to gun control that would prevent mass shootings, school shootings, and general gun crime. Nationally, 98-99% of these are committed with regular firearms.
Ghost guns on the other hand are involved in 1-2% of all violent crimes. You'd think otherwise because the RECOVERY rate is 40-50% of all guns, meaning whenever the police recover a firearm from a crime scene, about half of those are ghost guns. But that doesn't mean the guns were used to commit the crime itself, often it's more like "we caught this guy dealing weed, he was on probation, and had a ghost gun in his car". The actual violent crime statistics for ghost guns is the above 1-2% - that's where the firearm used was a ghost gun.
But of course you can have more than one mass shootings a day (365 shootings as of 30 Sept in 2026, with 361 dead, 1553 injured), and not lift a finger. But one CEO gets offed with a ghost gun, and suddenly the 1-2% of gun crime gets more focus and crackdown than the other 98%+...
really has minimal to do with the final product. From what I can tell you can't just 3d print a gun from start to finish
I'm pretty sure you can. It might only work once though.
Basic guns aren't really all that complex.
They used to make guns out of umbrella parts.
One of the best guns of all time (the .45 1911) was made by a typewriter offshoot of Remington.
hold on let me go sue home depot for selling black iron pipe and nails because someone made a pipe bomb. Nowhere has poly-maker ever advertised or suggested their speciality filaments could make firearms.
Someone's looking for a payout settlement, fuck California
the problem is that someone is San Diego county
you could literally make a shotgun with that too. Saw a YouTube video. Two pipes, one fit in the other, small one was the right size to hold a shell, and a nail at the end of the closed pipe triggered it if you used your hands to hit it.
Super effective and easy one shot shotgun. there's no real way to regulate guns IMO. They're not complicated devices.
Don't tell them about pipes.
I believe they'll eventually come for those too.
IMO the real end goal of these laws isn't to ban ghost guns, it's to ban plebs from being able to build or create anything at all. 3D printing a plastic piece to fix a broken tab in some gizmo cuts into corporate profits so a manufactured moral panic about ghost guns appears. I'm sure they'll eventually get to a pipe rifle moral panic at some point to lock down DIY plumbing.
" Oi, you got a licence for that sewage mate? "
I am skeptical about that, though the visual is funny.
They used fear of guns to attack Right to Repair and small manufacturing. It was never about guns.
The specifics revolve around a 3d-printed-gun advocate named Sean Aranda, whose youtube channel focuses on the subject. According to him, when youtube demonetized the channel in 2023 Polymaker approached him with a sponsorship offer. A couple months later Polymaker announced Aranda was a new member of its marketing team.
So regardless of where you stand on the Calif anti-3d-gun law, this isn't a simple case of going after egg farmers because of illegal omelets.
You've got some point there, but doesn't demonstrate the uselessness of the law? Unless of course they are going after every producer of technical filaments, which is like going after anyone with a lathe or a CNC machine.
No I think this is an example of the opposite - it's not an action against the filament industry or the 3d printing community in general, it's against an individual company for allegedly marketing filament specifically to print guns, not just because filament could or might be used to print guns. Whether the law itself is right or wrong is a different issue.
Which makes the law useless. People with nefarious plans don't need ads. There really are just two possibilities, either it is repressive and overreaching or it is useless.
Ok whatever. I won't try to argue over the validity of your definition of "useless" since you clearly think it's absolute.
It is not absolute, you are free to argue in which way it is useful, in practical terms. Have you done so?
Do you think any follower of mentioned channel has difficulties finding functional FDM filaments without ads on the channel? If not, whats the point of the law's application in this example?
They're trying to make this a case over marketing and intent rather than materials.
The actual types of filament they're concerned with are carbon fiber nylon (sold by many brands) and "PLA Pro" which is just a bit better regular PLA.
These are sold by tons of brands all across the internet.
Polymaker did not respond to requests for comment.
Statements like these always seem deceiving to me. Like, how much time did you give them? Some of these people race to get their story out too quickly, without giving a reasonable amount of time for a response.
What if they respond later? I guess they could update the article, but that's still after people have already read it and formed their opinions based on the original contents.
This is very normal, and not meant to be deceiving. If the group who didn't respond to the request does respond after the article was published, that will be removed and a statement that reads something like "Polymaker (insert title or department) responded after initial publishing with this statement" and that statement will follow after. From a journalistic integrity standpoint it shows that they wanted to get both sides of a story, especially if one side was interviewed or quoted. The alternative of not stating that comment was requested is we read the article and wonder if Polymaker ever got a chance to speak their side.
If things goes the way I think it will, California will need more guns to fight off the Trump Regime during the opening years of the 2nd American Civil War.
I hope this lawsuit fails.
The type of people buying those guns will definitely not be on the side against the regime.
That is completely bizarre.
This is getting a bit fucking ridiculous. They're suing filament manufacturers now.
A video I posted a few months ago about this bullshit: https://youtu.be/E1B2cWEaWDw
Pfffffff hahahaha, are you also going to go after weed walker too?
The USA is a joke
Is this filament specifically designed for guns?
No, polymaker just have a big range of engineering friendly filament, just as they have pretty artsy ones, and low cost workhorse filament for makers
It's like saying steel is specifically designed for guns. For plastics, stronger is a nice property for many applications.
Americans can order guns to their doors, but the 3d printers are the issues you choose to tackle...
No, they can't. Guns can only be legally shipped to a federally licensed gun dealer. The dealer cannot transfer it to the buyer without the mandated background check.
The gun laws are already fucked up enough. You don't have to make shit up.