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Comment by _trampeltier | Hacker News Reader

2 Minutes to print a barrel? Is 3D pring really so far already? Somehow I can't believe this.

It isn’t. They’ve confused a 3D printer with a lathe.

I’m guessing Reuters is uncritically repeating the police’s story. It’s in both the police and Reuters’ best interest to make this a sexy modern story about 3D printing, rather than a boring story about raiding a basic machine shop turning out unregistered firearms. Which feels approximately ten thousand times more likely.

You can't make gun barrels on a lathe in two minutes either. Unless you started with a gun barrel.

You can certainly drill out a very short, non-rifled barrel on a drill lathe in single-digit minutes. Everything in this story is an exaggeration or misunderstanding, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find the “2 minute” figure to be a wild-ass guess too.

Yeah, you can make a hole in some metal. I would argue that doesn't make it a "gun barrel". A barrel will almost always have rifling and some sort of breech locking mechanism. Unless you've got some truly wild CNC setup, you have no chance of both making the hole (even smoothbore) and any sort of locking mechanism.

If your gun doesn't lock (simple blowback for example), then you can skip the breech locking mechanism.

Agreed that I don't think you can meaningfully rifle a barrel in under 2 minutes though.

So even Reuters makes mistakes? I consider them to be the most unbiased news source.

Sadly, this doesn't seem like a mistake. It seems like they're either negligent or complicit in spreading propaganda.

I understand that is "2 minutes to mount a weapon with previously printed spare parts". I could be wrong. Maybe a 'lost in translation' case.

My bet would be a lonesome survivalist trying to increase its fine "that for sure will impress lotta chicks" weapon collection. Could be a furtive also or a wannabee seller.

The most interesting part would be to know how the police discovered him. Probably the old 'bragging in front of friends'.

Could be technically possible for one of those 3D files to call home somehow? Maybe they made a report when downloaded in some dark place of the web?

It's not, that's nonsense or a gross misunderstanding.

In any case making gun barrels has been doable with fairly simple metal working tools long before 3d printing - particularly if you're not hung up on reproducible quality. But even that would still take a few hours. 3d printing is a bad fit for that task.

That's because it's false!

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