I may be new here, but i think i have a great idea.

[Razgriz25thinf]

This excites me, so i'm gonna jump right in.

In my experience, no matter where you go, the vast majority of prop makers fall into two categories:
The first scratch build a mechanically or non-mechanically functional prop out of whatever materials they want.

The second take something that already exists and builds around it into what they want.

Now, neither of those are bad! They take a lot of effort and are to be commended heavily for their effort.

But a thought hit me, and that was the 3d gun printing fiasco. You can't really 3d print a gun... The materials just aren't strong enough.

But see, i play a lot of milsim airsoft. And there it is: You can't 3d print a gun, but you can 3d print an airsoft gun.

And thats what i want to do. Gut an airsoft gun for it's gearbox, hop-up, barrel, etc, and stick it inside a custom made 3d printed body, with slaved electronics tracking its fire. But that only really works for rifles, so... i can go further.

Gas Blowback. It's a method of taking Propane gas or CO2 and using it to propel the bb, while simulating a realistic recoil effect. Imagine a line of screen accurate, perfectly function airsoft replicas, with functioning blow back slides on a magnum, the bolt handle on an MA5 flying back and forth as you hold down the trigger, the strong kick of the gas system providing excellent recoil. All with functional electronics tracking the number of shots you've made.

So the basic idea for an MA5 is to take, say, a KWA LM4 gas system and bolt, magazine, all the functional bits, and hide them inside a body specially designed to contain them. The magazine would hide in an accurate "sleeve". A spacer inside all the magazines could restrict the capacity to the exact capacity of the game counterpart, 32 bbs for an MA5C for example. This would work for an M6, too, just need pistol parts. Like i said, all the normal electronics would work fine, so the existing technology from people like thatdecade wouldn't need to change at all.

Let me give a little visual demonstation.


1. trigger drops hammer
2, hammer trips valve on magazine
3. gas is ported to the barrel
4. bb is shot out of barrel
5. recoil forces the slide back, re-cocking the hammer, the recoil spring asserts itself and the slide comes back forward, chambering a new bb.
6. the gun is ready to fire again.

Like it says, all you need is the magazine, gas port, and inner barrel/hop-up assembly. everything else anyone could fabricate. So why not make it an M6C, for example? 1911 magazines would work, and just about any barrel/hop-up and gas port assembly could fit inside the body without much trouble.

Functionally, the hardest part would just be modeling them to fit perfectly. The scope of the project is not out of reach at all. Me and a friend did something similar, that really kickstarted this idea to begin with. We took the mechanical guts of a spare gun and built a custom wooden body to fit them inside(we canibalized a different gun for the rest, but we easily could have made the whole thing out of wood), not really trying to make anything in particular. And it worked, pretty much flawlessly, with the exception of magazine retention, which was not possible with the crude parts we had to work with.

Even kind of looks like a knock off pistol-caliber M395, in hindsight.

Anyways, the point is that with access to a 3d printer, ANY plastic-printing 3d printer, a talented team could churn out completely functional airsoft replicas of ANY sci-fi gun they wanted.

Comments, questions, suggestions?

 

[Final3ch0]

Hmmm this could work. It'd be really REALLY complicated but it really could work. Duribality is your biggest hurdle though. You may have to give it a few coats of fiberglass but that's why prototypes exist.

 

[Razgriz25thinf]

The most important parts would have to reinforced, whether with strips of metal or just extra material, just like any other airsoft gun. points of stress like the slide rails, hammer assembly, and trigger group being the most vulnerable on a pistol. On a rifle, it's the exact same thing, really. Identify the usual break points in a GBB, and make sure those points in your gun are reinforced.

 

[Final3ch0]

Couldn't have said it better myself

 

[Razgriz25thinf]

The more i think about this, the easier it seems to get. An M6 would be a piece of friggin' cake. There is nothing mechanically or physically special about an M6. At all. A completely unmodified GBB pistol system would work perfectly.


A bit hard to see, but the entire system would work JUST like a 1911 GBB, except the barrel would be completely fixed, whereas a 1911 is a tilting barrel assembly.

An MA5, however, is a bit more tricky, but not impossible by any means.


An M4 gas and bolt assembly is just too big. It requires a buffer assembly behind the bolt and that doesn't work, the stock area of an MA5 is tiny. However, an M14 gas system would work perfectly. A forward mounted buffer spring with a camming operation rod is perfect in two ways. First, the bolt handle can fix directly to the op rod, moving with the bolt, and allowing you to actually chamber rounds with the bolt handle. Second, the system utilizes all the forward space that you would get on an MA5, and uses no rear space except the recoil slot for the bolt, which itself is only a few inches long. It would all be hidden inside the ample space in an MA5's body, as well, it's very non-intrusive.

That system could work on basically all the bullpup weapons in Halo. Both the BR and the DMR have under-barrel gas systems reminiscent of an M14 system. I also studied up on how 3-round burst systems work, and its not out of the picture to make a BR that has a realistic 3-round burst. The theories all are perfectly sound.

 

[Dracosfire83]

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[Final3ch0]

The beauty of halo weapons is the firing mechanisms all resemble a real gun, for instance, the battle rifle is identical to the Famas, the assault rifle is p90 with a built up housing and the handgun simply is an HK P-30 with more pronounced features.

 

[Razgriz25thinf]

Two things first the 3D print guns work fine I made several and they work fine and two what you are planing already exists they are used for police training and I have seen them in some high end arcades.

Unless you can 3d print steel, durability for intermediate caliber firearms that were 3d printed are basically non-existent. You can't just reinforce stress points on a firearm, the entire receiver is a stress point.

Second, i highly doubt the legitimacy of your claim. Police use airsoft guns, of course, they're called PTWs, professional training weapons. But 3d printing a custom receiver set for a cherry-picked gas blow back system based on sci-fi firearms is literally unheard of.

Unless i get some pretty definitive proof, such as a video those firearms dumping 200+ rounds in a single session without any major failure, i'm just gonna label what you said as one-upping. If you can prove me wrong, i am begging you, i NEED to see this stuff in action. It would be very relevant to my interests.

 

[Razgriz25thinf]

The beauty of halo weapons is the firing mechanisms all resemble a real gun, for instance, the battle rifle is identical to the Famas, the assault rifle is p90 with a built up housing and the handgun simply is an HK P-30 with more pronounced features.

Excuse the double post, dont really want to wait for a reply to respond to this.

Most of this is speculation, to be honest. In reality, i doubt there is much a relation of the BR to a FAMAS, except the visual similarities. The FAMAS uses a somewhat unique Lever-delayed Blowback, which has no gas system, something that the BR55/85 clearly has, a gas tube directly below the barrel. Not only that, but the BR 55 is canonically a short-stroke, gas operated, rotating bolt design. I would equate it with an upside-down AR-18 assembly, which shares those same features.

As for the Assault Rifle, the P90 is a straight blow-back operation aka no gas system, again. I would more closely relate it to an AR-18 again, if i had to guess. The reason i say this is because canonically, the MA5 is also a short-stroke, gas operated, rotating bolt weapon.

The Magnum really isn't any kind of pistol. The P30 is just a pistol, there's nothing special about it, but i wouldn't relate it to the magnum, well, at all. Why? Well, the P30 is a hammer fired weapon, the Magnum is not. The magnum is a striker-fired, recoil-operated handgun. It shares the same round as the Desert Eagle, so there's that. .50 AE, aka 12.7x40mm.

 

[Dracosfire83]

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[RobTC]

One day I'll have a DCLS printer in my house.

Given the pressures that BB guns operate at, you could technically fab everything yourself except the regulator. I suppose if you're trying to make the mechanics as close as possible to the actual weapon that wouldn't work, but why do you need to? A BB gun is a completely different beast, and dumping 200PSI or whatever gas through a copper pipe with a spring-loaded gas operated reloading assembly doesn't really sound particularly difficult. You can take advantage of the fact that a BB gun is NOT a firearm to make it all much easier on yourself. The easiest to start with would be the DMR, since you only have one shot to worry about and a huge body to fit it in. The rest get more difficult, from the minaturisation of the M6 to the full auto of the AR.

Body-wise, you'll have to use ABS with decent in-fill if you want it to last more than a single session, and as far as I'm aware the pneumatics aren't con-safe (the only reason I'm not building a CO2 blowback mechanism for my BR85), but it's entirely feasible.

It's barely an engineering challenge, if you're one of the techie kids who came up making cannons and tesla coils. Unless all of that was exactly what you were saying, it got a little hard to tell sometimes in your excitement. In which case... Yep.

If you were saying that it could all be 3D printed, I'm dubious, but from your talk of gearboxes and receivers I don't think that's what you're saying. I'm having a hard time focusing today (time change messed me up for once), so I'll have to come back to this later.

 

[Razgriz25thinf]

One day I'll have a DCLS printer in my house.

Given the pressures that BB guns operate at, you could technically fab everything yourself except the regulator. I suppose if you're trying to make the mechanics as close as possible to the actual weapon that wouldn't work, but why do you need to? A BB gun is a completely different beast, and dumping 200PSI or whatever gas through a copper pipe with a spring-loaded gas operated reloading assembly doesn't really sound particularly difficult. You can take advantage of the fact that a BB gun is NOT a firearm to make it all much easier on yourself. The easiest to start with would be the DMR, since you only have one shot to worry about and a huge body to fit it in. The rest get more difficult, from the minaturisation of the M6 to the full auto of the AR.

Body-wise, you'll have to use ABS with decent in-fill if you want it to last more than a single session, and as far as I'm aware the pneumatics aren't con-safe (the only reason I'm not building a CO2 blowback mechanism for my BR85), but it's entirely feasible.

It's barely an engineering challenge, if you're one of the techie kids who came up making cannons and tesla coils. Unless all of that was exactly what you were saying, it got a little hard to tell sometimes in your excitement. In which case... Yep.

If you were saying that it could all be 3D printed, I'm dubious, but from your talk of gearboxes and receivers I don't think that's what you're saying. I'm having a hard time focusing today (time change messed me up for once), so I'll have to come back to this later.

Yeah, that's basically what i'm saying! Sorry, i get really excited and go off on tangents sometimes.

The only, only thing i'd like to buy as opposed to make myself would be the gas port and hop-up, simply for the best pressure and seal possible. Other than that, with the exception of the magazine, the sky is the limit as far as fabbing these parts go.

Oh, and yes, as you said, ABS was my material of choice, if i get that choice. I'm sure there's some printer out there that prints some real nice nylon fiber plastic, but i bet they cost a pretty penny too much.

I was actually going to start with the M6C, simply because i am much better versed with pistol GBB systems, and have a lot of spare units to pull from.

As far as the rifles go, Full Auto isn't a big challenge to be honest. If we get desperate just cause we can't get the darned thing to work, we can pull a selector unit from the gun that the system is from, in this case, an M14 for the MA5.(of course, if i wanted to be as legit as possible, if L85 gas systems were more common, i'd use those. Because the L85 is basically a direct copy of an AR-18, albeit a bullpup one.)

So to clarify:

My intent is to 3d print a body around which the important gas parts will fit. Like you said, it's barely an engineering challenge, most of the hard work has already been done for me. This is a design problem. How can i make sure that everything fits in place and functions flawlessly and is sturdy enough in it's mechanism that it could survive 1000+ shots?

 

[Razgriz25thinf]

I highly doubt anyone is gonna put up a video of someone shooting a "Liberator" 200+ times mainly because it i a single shot weapon that's not easily loaded and it would be about 1 hour for every 20 shots. On top of that the odds are if it would be done then it still wouldn't be good enough unless it fires 300 then 400 then 500+ when I've seen police issue Glocks fail at 300+ rounds.

As far as the blow back training weapons I mentioned they are what we used for training in school 15 years ago they where real guns converted to fired a laser to show shot placement on a canvas target and the "simulated recoil" was a co2 "mag" that triggered blow back to aid in a more realistic follow up shot. I only mentioned this because you where looking for a way to simulate a weapon firing and instead of starting from scratch you might be able to find some useful info on how to accomplish your goal by reverse engineering something that is already available.

Even if you choose to shrug of my comment I wish you luck.

It seemed more from the brevity of your last message that it was more a kind of one-upping. I'm glad to say that i was wrong, and i'm sorry. Text is hard to interpret sometimes.

Anyways, my intent isn't to technically simulate a weapon firing. The way the system is designed, it does that completely on it's own as a result of how it works. The gas that pushes the bb also propels the slide backward on it's rails, as a part of the third law of motion. Then the spring it compressed while coming backwards decompresses and pulls the slide back forward, re chambering the weapon and re-cocking the hammer/striker.

Fortunately though, very little needs to be reverse-engineered. The entire scope of the project is already laid out before me, i understand how to make it work already, as overall it's pretty darn simple.