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As a salute to Marvin Heemeyer, DEFCAD presents the Killdozer Keychain by Stubbs. The SPLC recently named us a "general anti-government" organization, so in the spirit of whatever that means we solicit your ideas for improved Killdozer designs.

This has been a wild week of releases, starting with AWCY? sharing The Carbon Alloy Mac DIY Upper. And it's exactly what it sounds like: composite materials in an upper reciever. The MAC platform is incredibly simple, but this proof of concept is a necessary innovation in a direction away from exclusive use of the Ender-3. All things considered, this is another step toward maturity of the multi-year line of MAC-11 projects.

User scsm shows a creative approach to the printable handgun frame with the Stack-a-Gat 19. Instead of printing the entire frame in one shot, the Stack-a-Gat is made as 6 separate layers printed individually and then fastened together with through bolts or stand-offs. While 3D pure printing is more suited for prototyping, this is a good approach for maximizes the strength of your build.

Finally, we have Unseenkiller's improved Recession Ruger R2. The excellence of this design is in its combination of the killer's prior work on similar platforms, and linking this to an affordable parts kit.

Gun printing and intellectual property can be difficult for the masses to understand, so it's important to have a steward. The Gatalog Foundation, run by the most expert amateurs in 3D2A, has already been where you're trying to go. From an overabundance of care and not-for-profit feeling, they will be your shepherd. They know how to protect your digital right to bear digital arms.

With a membership that anyone can afford, at just $400, The Gatalog Foundation is building the most intelligent national effort to actually fight for and police your property. Plus there's a magazine.

Join today, and be sure to ask about student discounts!

DIY Defense is by definition an amateur effort. There's a quality to the quantity of people creating tools for their defense in spite of the cold lies of the state, and every day there are improved resources available to simplify and accelerate the developent of popular projects.

A more recent trend in 3D2A is the creation of inversions of existing geometry as solid bodies. Most CAD software allows boolean operations, such as Fusion360's combine tool, where 2 objects intersecting can have a portion of the overlapping space cut away. This allows a designer to focus on the overall shape of the object since the critical relationships are carried by the inverted model.

The first model of this kind came anonymously with the AR-15 Internals Cutaway Geometry project. Given that the lower receiver on an AR-15 links a series of sub-components together to allow the functioning of the overall firearm, it is a clear beneficiary of this design method. The other anonymous distribution came in the shape of the DD43x Internal Cutaway, with its exaggerated magazine and pin geometry.

While his files only made it to DEFCAD this week, philphisher actually contributed to this design style over a year ago with the Glock 3D Printable Virtual Build Kit, which contains almost every variation of the DD17.2, DD19.2, and DD26.2 platforms, and remains the largest project in this vein in terms of options (including left and right handed variations for every model).

Finally, Punished Jackal submits the G100 Internals Cutaway, which is the same idea for the G100 and Spectre 2 systems. Notably, most of the critical dimensions are locked within the chassis itself. So this cutaway has the most flexibility in terms of the sorts of designs that can be produced.

DEFCAD remains a large provider of firearms-related technical data on the Internet, and that does not just mean hosting mesh files. A clear necessity is hosting any and all reference texts for the practical design of firearms. This week we have a submission sourced from the United States Army Materiel Command Headquarters in the form of the Engineering Design Handbook: Maintainability Guide for Design (AMCP/MCP 706-134).

An essential concern in the current DIY Defense space is tracking the effective and useful natures of popular designs. More often than not, this boils down to a mixture of round count and aesthetic appreciation. Truly breaking down whether these projects are reliable, or ultimately maintainable, tends to get ignored. And hey, it's difficult enough to produce a design in the first place. Most of the Army's Engineering design handbooks from the past decades are excellent resources to begin to expand our understanding and hopefully improve the state of the art.

Coming in at nearly 500 pages, this text encompasses significantly more than just small arms design. There is a wealth of tangential topics and techniques for new developers to devour, including: ammo storage, malfunctions, weapon adaptation kits, electrical systems, seals, fasteners, standardization, human body limitations, maintainability styles, and even going into detail on aircraft and marine systems. This will most likely be a skim read, with a few chapters demanding stricter attention, but what an introduction to solving the sorts of problems we face in the space.

Lastly, we have Jon Kraft, who presented this video on how to Build Your Own Drone Tracking Radar: Part 1. Especially after the Russo-Ukrainian war, there's a huge need to adapt and produce civilian drone projects for the new reality of combat. Jon is already five parts into detailing how someone at home could produce a system for being able to find and track these new dangers.

This video is a great point of departure for how these kinds of systems might operate. Using open source hardware and electronics systems could be a dispositive factor in the 5G trench wars of the future.