Blog

New Year, new DEFCAD newsletter! A ton of great projects have been published in just the past month, so lets get right to it. The P90BLK by shadowhunter55 is a successor to the 3DP90 and arrived with great fanfare. Based on the Brownells BRN-180 system, it's one of the best looking projects to come out of the DIY Defense space in a long time. Following that we have HoffmanTactical's release of the AR-308 version of his SL-15 series: the SL-308. Hoffman’s lowers are considered a gold standard and it' great to see major developers showing some love for the AR-308. Last on the rifle front, SSARMS created an homage to the QBZ-95 with the PLAR system. This is primarily a sort of AR-15 skin, but it's more artistic than that, and really leverages all that FDM 3D Printing has to offer.

Of recent pistol developments, the month started out strong with the release of The Sphynx. Unseenkiller is still on an epic run of output, but we'd like to highlight two different frame projects serving under-utilized designs. The first is the Bishop , which works on 10mm and .45 Glock Frames, and the second is the Ergo, which fills out the SD-9 and SD-40 pistols from Smith & Wesson.

DEFCAD hosts more than just kit gun files. Middletonmade just released a new bump grip design in the form of the Instant Noodle Bump Grip, which is an excellent and simple design distinguished from the classic bump stock by its lack required stock modification and simple method of adjustment to control for select fire and bump fire. 

Airsoft project files have now become a regular part of DEFCAD distribution, and Proof has come out with The Pudding, which relies on no metal parts and may be the most streamlined public airsoft pistol design. Ending out this month's notable releases, Chocsura released a parametric design in the form of a Universal Picatinny Riser. By adjusting a table in Freecad, we get bespoke picatinny attachments to order.

Another successful year of DEFCAD access and distribution, covering the full spectrum of DIY Defense projects on the Internet. This year DEFCAD served more people in two weeks than the total, lifetime sum of members of The Gatalog Rocketchat. DEFCAD is top three for over 5,000 keywords on Google search. Check out our DEFCAD 2024 End of Year Wrap-up to see our other milestones and the most popular products to date. We'll have an even stronger year in 2025, and maintain our position as the single largest source of The Signal.

Matador Arms announced several key products at SHOT Show 2025, only a week ago. The Espada Bullpup, compatible with Colt stick mags, The Stizon Lower Receiver with the Stizon 55 round helical magazine from S&T Inc, the first of its kind, and the 120R Pistol are part of our newly-announced lineup.

All these products are chambered in 9mm, and will be available on or before the end of April. Matador continues to rapidly, relentlessly expand the use and compatibility of their 9mm Upper Receiver that's universally adaptable to the Bullpup Lower, along with their newly-released AR9 9mm lower receivers compatible with Colt and MP5 (and now the Stizon Mags). These complement our previously-released Glock Mag compatible lowers that many are already familiar with.

Last, but not least, the 120R Pistol, a unique system that, at its core, is based on the G120R Receiver from G100. The receiver is a chassis or fire control unit that holds the trigger assembly, and can be swapped to other pistol grips or future PDWs. This system is a cage rattler. Folks are going to have to think about new systems, grips modules, PDWs and other innovations since the G120R is based on an open source platform, and other companies are being encouraged to build an ecosystem around the product.

Matador Arms is taking the unprecedented first steps to release a new pistol based on this platform, which will challenge not only the Glock market, but also the Sig side.

As you can see, we've been busy in the last 12 months. Please continue to follow on Social Media and the usual places, including http://www.matadorarms.com. Reach out with any questions at info@matadorarms.com

There have been great strides in pure project releases in the past six months, but there's only been one group that consistently crushes in the Remix genre, and that's The Black Lotus Coalition. BLC has a solid set of designs that they apply to the outer skin of many firearm platforms, and it's always a pleasure to see the new styles at play. Check out the main page for the following projects and at the bottom of the page you will see all the relevant remixes.

SY22 : A semiautomatic 22 pistol that's cheap to produce and extremely reliable!

Sudy 23/52 : The Sudy 23/52 release packs are PPS-43 receivers you can build in Semi Automatic using an AR-15 FCG, or Fully Automatic using the original Bolt and FCG.

MP22K : Semi-auto 22lr with a homemade bolt, fully equiped with maximum slappy.

The FDM 3DP story is also a story of patents. The Stratsys patent expirations originally allowed 3D2A firearm production to begin. Another development that we've been excited for in recent months has been the introduction of multi-height bricklaying as a method of fused deposition. DEFCAD already shared this video describing it, but essentially this technique mis-aligns filament layers in order to maximize the strength between layers where bonding is weaker. The issue has been that even though the technology was available in theory, no slicer on the market could actually resolve the problem. 

But the issue could now be solved. There are some first steps to integrating this procedure using Orcaslicer or Prusaslicer. Go to the Github and check it out today! With all the advances in consumer available material science and refinements on the FDM space this next year is shaping up to be a whole new age of design.