I successfully assembled an AR10 lower receiver(mostly). I skipped some of the tiny parts due to minor errors in the printing/support-removal. I’m going to try printing it with the other side up and maybe turn it to the other side.
Here are some pics of my recent progress.
AR10 lower left showing support removal
You can see here in the background on my (messy) workbench a previous AR10 print which was damaged when I removed the support material.
Here is an AR10, pretty side up, with the hammer down.
AR10 lower receiver showing support material remnants
AR10 lower showing the pretty side with the hammer up
Here is an AR10 lower just finished printing.
AR10 on the printbed after printing complete. When I print stuff this big, I generally let them run overnight. Wake up in the morning to find this on the printbed; it’s kinda like christmas.
Once I get access to a range again, I’m going to order the rest of the parts I need to assemble a complete rifle. It’s nice knowing I can make the important parts of a lower receiver. A little more work and I’ll have it 100%.
Very nice work! I finally got around to getting internals into my own printed lower and hope to do a range test before too long.
I’m curious as to why you printed the lower on the side rather than upright – you’d have a lot less support material to deal with. Or did you want to ensure that you had nice clean cross holes instead?
The lower receiver does not fit upright in the build area of the printer. My Prusa Mendel has a vertical limit of about 100mm.
Also the printed part is weakest in the vertical axis, and the fire control group parts exert stress in that direction. Though that would not deter me from at least testing to see if the part would withstand such forces in the weak direction, but I just can’t fit it on my printer.
aside: it’s really nice to see a non-spam comment on my blog.
I’m actually not terribly concerned about the FCG part forces myself – after installing the trigger and hammer, things are looking fine. I did have cracking of the bolt hold catch lugs and front takedown lugs, though (just what I was hoping to prevent by adding more reinforcement). I applied Weld-On 3 to help fuse the layers better and will see if that does the trick (I’m also going to use a solid dowel pin for the bolt hold instead of the roll pin).
Do you have AR10 .STL files available?
I got my AR10 files here: http://www.cncguns.com/downloads.html