Free Arms Project

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dustind

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Over at the www.freestateproject.org I heard about the free arms project. It plans to design an open source firearm to be distributed over the internet. The idea is that it will be simple and functional. Most importantly anyone should be able to build it.

Here is a cut and past from the post located at http://forum.freestateproject.org/index.php?board=6;action=display;threadid=4878

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/free-arms/

Received the following forwarded to me by another packin' extropian:
""William Stone, III" <wrs@0...> wrote:

I'll be announcing this more globally soon, but I thought y'all might be interested in seeing a work in progress.

The Zero Aggression Institute is sponsoring the Free Arms Project: a project to produce a patentless, Open Source, Open Hardware personal weapon. The intent is to produce the Linux of firearms: something whose designs can be posted on the Internet, downloaded, and built by anyone with the technical werewithal.

To that end, I've created a Yahoo Group called free-arms (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/free-arms).

So far, I've populated the files and links with those relating to the Gyrojet (simply because I had lots of material from researching last week's column). The Free Arms Project isn't concentrating on a Gyrojet,
mind you -- the intent is to consider any and every possibility.

For the moment, however, the group has lots of fun Gyrojet pictures.

Freedom, Immortality, and the Stars!

Bill Stone
____________________________________________
William Stone, III |
Executive Director | No human being has the right under
Zero Aggression Institute | any circumstances -- to
| initiate force against
E-Mail: wrs@0... | another human being, nor to
Web: http://www.0ap.org | threaten or delegate its
initiation.
 
Is that the book that was like UC, but for computer nerds? I never read it, but am planning to.

Edit: I did a search, never mind the question about Cryptonomicon.
 
They haven't outlawed knowledge, quite yet.

But building your own firearm is already heavily-regulated ($200 tax, anyone?) and I'm willing to bet that if this is publicized enough, the gov't will do something similar with buying, owning, or distributing the plans for a firearm.

pax
 
That is under some debate now, because of the 9th Circuit court decision in the Maadi Griffin case. I think this is a great idea. I see it as ending up being a gun that's essentially a cross between the Glock and the Kel-Teck P-11, although probably all metal.
 
Pax, there is no tax or license to build it for your own use without the intent to sell it. Just rules like you can't build a machine gun.
 
How the heck could you build your own gun!? You would need tons of raw material and equipment!
Click to expand...
Nope. I've posted this story before, but I'll do it again now...

From Guy Lautard's The Machinist's Bedside Reader, vol 1, page 116,

"...Joe was a grinding room supervisor for one of the biggest lumber outfits in Western Canada. He calls himself a "grinder man." Joe was not a trained machinist, although he was able to ask questions of such wizards when he needed help. He had no milling machine. He did have a wood lathe, for which he rigged a crude sort of compound rest. For the most part he worked with files, while the rough work he did with hacksaws and by grinding. He worked entirely without working drawings - a cutaway, sectional, or exploded view of some rifle mechanism was all he'd go by, and from that he'd make a full sized working rifle of that type.

...

And what did he make?

A Remington Rolling Block rifle in caliber .45-70. A Farquharson rifle. A .44cal Remington Revolving Carbine. A .22cal single action pistol. A 9mm Luger, fully functional except that, lacking provision of a magazine well and magazine, it was not a repeater. A single barrel version of the Remington .41 rimfire O/U Derringer - and at least a dozen other weapons.

...

He had bored, reamed, and rifled his own barrels..."

Everyone should learn to make their own guns. It's fun!

- Chris
 
They could make one plan for a handgun and one for a rifle so that you could work on whatever type you wanted. Like distros for Linux. Slackware would be a nice but complicated rifle and Mandrake could be a revolver. :D
 
Aren't the milspec 1911 and M16 already the closest thing we have to "open-source" guns? All the dimensions and materials for the parts are known. There are no patents on the design. I even keep a blueprint for a AR15/M16 receiver. ;)
 
Just buy the barrels and action. They are not regulated.

BTW, the tax stamp applies if you intend to build an NFA weapon (ie SBR or AOW).
Unfortunately you can't build a machine gun...... or can you?

We'll have to wait and see what comes out of the 9th circuit.

Some intrepid souls have already sent in Form 1's to ATF intending to build MG's.
None have been approved yet. ;)
 
This project is suppost to be for people world wide. I like the idea of just using an AR-15 / M-16 or something like that. Couldn't you just use a non rifled barrel? I imagine you could still hit things a houndred yards away. This is assuming you could not buy parts.
 
ShaiVong and Thumbtack -

A CNC mill makes things easier (and CNC equipment has gotten pretty inexpensive) but if you have a manual mill, you're 90% there.

I assume that he rifled the barrels via the traditional method: drilling and reaming the blanks, then using a rifling cutter and fixture to cut the grooves. It's not exactly a cakewalk, but building the equipment can be done.

Back to the topic - for an insurgency weapon, I wouldn't even bother with rifled barrels. A double-barreled muzzle-loading pistol with a simple electrical firing system would be quite enough to defend one's life from common thugs. Or to, ahem, 'secure' a better weapon...

- Chris
 
Back to the topic - for an insurgency weapon, I wouldn't even bother with rifled barrels. A double-barreled muzzle-loading pistol with a simple electrical firing system would be quite enough to defend one's life from common thugs. Or to, ahem, 'secure' a better weapon...
Click to expand...

Wouldnt it be the best to just make a single barrel breach load shotgun? No rifling to worry about... And if you had to reload in a snap you could practically make it a blunderbuss and just pack the shells full of glass or BB's or rocks, with a little piece of cloth to seperate the powder from the projectile.
 
Wasn't the STEN pretty much the WWII equivalent of this? I thought a basic machine shop could turn one out pretty easily, although it's been a while since I read the history of these. Anyone else remember?
 
A few years ago there was a Detroit area shop teacher busted for illegal weapons manufacture. He was evidently making sub-machine guns in the school shop after hours and selling them to local gang members. I figure they either had to be variations on the Mac-10 design or the Sten gun, but I never did find out which.
 
The STEN design will have legal complications, especially for those of us in UNfree States.

I think some here are missing the point. The idea as I understand it is not to post a tutorial to how to assemble parts. These people intend to develop a firearm which is not only effective and reliable, but also relatively simple to build. One assumes the new design should be something different from what has come before.

Then again, Linux is basically an advanced form of Unix, isn't it? Maybe the 1911 wouldn't be a bad idea. I would think the end product would be more like a combination of Glock and High-power features. It would need fairly simple lockwork so that there'd be fewer and simpler parts, but the plastic frame with metal inserts might be too much (Don't know; never tried it.)
 
Some of you guys are overthinking this. If you understand the basic functioning of a gun, it's amazing what you can build with simple hand tools and no detailed blue prints. Ever see pictures of the "jungle workshop" guns the VC made during the Vietnam war? They'd basically use a real gun, say a 1911, as a pattern and copy it using no more than hand tools. It wouldn't be an exact copy and some things, like the grip safety, would be deleted, but it would work.

Another example is the thriving gun makers of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border area. They've been making home made guns from essentially scrap metal for at least a century. In the past they've made everthing from copies of Tower Muskets, to Webley revolvers and Lee-Enfields. Now they make copies of AK 47's and RPD's.

If you really wanted to make an "open source" blue print for a handgun, either just pick a relatively straightforward design and reengineer it slightly to make it easier to produce with hand tools or design something from the ground up using established operating principles and techniques. Stick to simple steel fabricating methods and avoid plastic or any other exotic materials.
 
Two very easy ways to "subversively aquire" a 22 rimfire "gun" are to convert a spring-piston air rifle or a powder-activated nail gun. A "power hammer" is basically a straight-line powder-activated nailgun that fires 22-cal rimfire blanks, and at my local hardware store one costs all of $24.
........
After pondering this for all of twenty minutes, I'm not sure of the point of it all.
That being, an "open-source" firearm and all.
--Yes, with a diamond file and enough time you can duplicate most anything, but the whole slant of this effort seems to be helping people build "subversive weapons", and hand-duplicating a complex arm just because you can is hardly the point of a "subversive weapon". A slam-fire gun is by far easier to build than anything with a closed bolt, but those are illegal----but will that really matter? (if guns are illegal anyway....) A tubular receiver is by far easier to make than anything with an odd-shaped frame like a M16 or a 1911, and there are already machinists drawings for the Sten floating around online somewhere. And the people who would want this the most probably aren't going to have a internet-connected computer they can look it up on anyway.
--------
The problem I see here is that some people are suggesting confining designs to that which is legal, but therein lies the folly: anywhere guns can be legally owned, it would be a lot easier and more effective to just buy a commercially-manufactured gun than it would be to try to make one.....
--->And anywhere it's not legal to own a gun at all, the people who want one aren't going to care about the technical details of it as long as the thing fires when they pull the trigger--even if it fires more than one time.
~
 
If they could make functional guns with the tools available in the late 1800's, how hard do you think it could be? And submachineguns are even easier. I doubt it would take more than a few hours to put together an open-bolt subgun if you really wanted to.
 
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