http://www.nbcnews.c...51014668#51014668

From the Ars link:

The law student said that anyone with the same type of 3D printer (“SLA resin and P400 ABS on a used Dimension”) could replicate his efforts with “9 to 12 hours” of print time and “$150 to $200” in parts. "We’ve proven that you can build one for $50,” he said, presuming the builder is using lower quality materials. (Dimensions typically sell in the $30,000 range — but Wilson says his results could be duplicated using the less-expensive Ultimaker ($1,500) or Reprap.”

Assuming Defense Distributed’s AR-15 lower costs around $150 to print, it likely won't end up being price-competitive with other, commercially available polymer AR-15 lowers — a few minutes of Google searching turned up options priced at $135 to $170, depending on the manufacturer.

Of course, lots of 3D printing enthusiasts extol the fact that the price of the technology is rapidly falling — as we reported previously, a California company announced a $600 model last year.

People who are worried about the black helicopters aren't going to be making plastic guns in their basements, not for a while anyway. It'll always be cheaper for large manufacturers to make these things. (If the thinking is to appeal to the dead-ender/survivalist types who are worried Obummer's coming after their guns, well I don't think that's much of a real market myself. But who knows.)

And 9-12 hours of print time? That's huge.

http://www.businessw...rinting-gold-rush

A major problem with 3D printing ignored by most is that there’s no Moore’s Law-type mechanics underlying the technology. The physics behind fusing a powder with a laser, or melting plastic and squeezing it through a nozzle, pose severe limitations on the speed at which you can print an object. And once you’ve applied a layer of plastic, the printer must take time to move and adjust a platform supporting the object.

You can add a nozzle or two to speed up the work, but this is a far cry from doubling the amount of transistors on a chip every 18 months, or doubling the storage on a hard drive. There may come a spectacular advance to change these equations, but no one seems to have found any yet. And it seems unlikely that the amount spent on R&D today by the major makers of 3D printers—3D Systems, Stratasys, and Germany’s EOS—will be enough to turn up an unexpected, exponential price-per-performance booster.

FWIW.

Cheers,
Scott.