Re:FedEx and UPS Refuse to Ship a Digital Mill That Can Make...
by TazeTSchnitzel on Wednesday February 25, 2015 @05:47PM
(#9110314)
Wait, it can't make the AR-15 part itself, it literally just drills the holes? How... utterly useless.
The real deal is this: to get around US firearms laws, there's a mini-industry selling AR-15 "80% lower receivers".[1] These are sometimes advertised as "billets", but they're not unfinished castings. They're complete parts with a few holes omitted. With a template and a drill press, you can finish them. There's even a desktop router and jig combo to do that specific job. Costs $159.[2]
The Ghost Gunner is a little CNC desktop router built to do that specific job and not much else. It has small stepping motors and toothed rubber belts, like a 3D printer. It doesn't have the rigidity of a real milling machine, so it can't push a milling cutter sideways against resistance while holding precision. You couldn't mill anything out of a block of aluminum with it. It can drill holes of one size. That's all.
The site says that "pre-orders are sold out". They've been taking "non-refundable" deposits. It's quite possible that they aren't really manufacturing them, or they don't work very well, and want to claim they can't ship the things so they don't have to deliver.
I looked into getting one of these because I do some machining, usually at TechShop. (I'm into Teletype restoration and steampunk.) A low-cost little home CNC mill would be nice for making small metal parts. This isn't a real CNC mill. Roland has some nice desktop CNC mills, but they're much more expensive than this thing. There's a Kickstarter project for a real 3-axis desktop mill, but it's probably going to be priced around $2600. That's entry level for milling aluminum. If they wanted to make money and milling machines, rather than get press, there's a market for little CNC mills. That Kickstarter is way oversubscribed.
That's why this is all a PR stunt.
[1] http://www.80percentarms.com/ [2] http://www.80percentarms.com/products/308-easy-jig [3] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/178590870/the-nomad-cnc...