Building an AR using the Ghost Gunner

You may remember a couple years ago, when media attention began to focus on AK parts kits, Bryan Schatz published an article at Mother Jones magazine entitled, "I Built This AK-47. It's Legal and Totally Untraceable." In that case, Schatz went to a build party where someone provided him with all the tools and experience necessary to build an AK--basically all he had to do was push a button or pull a lever when directed--and he used it to supposedly demonstrate how easy it was to build an untraceable firearm. (I published a lengthy op-ed about Schatz' article here).

Now Andy Greenberg has published a similar article at Wired magazine entitled "I Made an Untraceable AR-15 ‘Ghost Gun’ in My Office—And It Was Easy." This article is similar in tone to Schatz's article: that it is too easy to build evil assault weapons that are untraceable by law enforcement. Although he did not destroy the receiver, as Schatz did, Greenberg did turn them into the police.

The only thing that sets this article apart from Schatz's piece is that Greenberg first describes how it actually wasn't that easy for someone with no experience. He initially bought an 80% receiver and attempted to finish it using a drill press and jig, and apparently mucked it up. After dropping several hundred dollars to rent the machine tools, buy the bits, vise, clamps, and 80% receiver, Greenberg was unable to build his untraceable gun:

As the drill bit chewed into the block, I felt a rush of excitement and tasted fine aluminum dust between my teeth. The bit threw off metal shavings and left behind a gleaming, polished crater. But my elation faded as I realized how badly I was mangling the trigger well. No matter how hard I cinched it down, the vise shuddered constantly, moving the aluminum piece. The holes I was cutting veered off until they were practically diagonal.

When I switched to the end mill to clean up the spaces between the pits I’d created, I found they were mostly at different depths: The drill bit had somehow moved up and down, and I hadn’t noticed. The bottom of the cavity I’d made began to resemble the surface of the moon. Meanwhile, the massive machine protested loudly, shaking like a train about to derail. Throughout this ordeal, WIRED video producer Patrick Farrell, a former bike mechanic who probably could have offered helpful advice, watched me struggle from behind his camera with a restrained smirk. The unwritten rule: I was in this alone.

I kept at it for five and a half hours. Then the head of the drill press—the part that holds the bit, which I’d later learn is called the “chuck”—fell off. I had no idea whether this was supposed to happen as a kind of fail-safe, or if I had destroyed an expensive piece of equipment rented with Farrell’s credit card. I screwed the chuck back in, and after a few more minutes of metal-on-metal violence, it dropped off again. (I still don’t know if I damaged the drill press, but a gunsmith later explained to me that it likely wasn’t designed to handle the lateral pressure of using it as a milling machine.)

That’s when I gave up. I had nothing to show for my labor but a sad metal block scarred by a maze of crooked channels. Well, that and a left hand bristling with tiny aluminum shards where my latex glove had split.

 He next tried using a 3-D printer to print a lower receiver. The results from the $2,800 3-D printer were also unusable. Greenberg describes:

As science-fictional as that process felt, the results were flawed. When I pried the finished lower receiver off the print bed, one side was covered in support material meant to prevent the hot plastic structures from collapsing before they solidified. Snapping and scraping off that matrix of plastic was a long, messy process. I tried using a knife, cut my thumb, and bled all over one side of the rifle body. And the same support materials also filled tiny holes in the piece, in some cases choking the delicate threads meant to accept metal screws.

 Finally, he tried the Ghost Gunner 3-D milling machine. Like Goldilocks, he found this machine to be just right:

I installed DDCut and found that for its primary purpose of finishing a lower receiver, the Ghost Gunner is absurdly easy to use—mostly because I was never given the chance to make any choices. Once DDCut began running the AR-15 file and cutting into my 80 percent-lower receiver, my only interaction with the software was clicking “next” through a 22-step set of instructions and then doing things to the aluminum part that the software told me to do.

For one hour-long stretch in that process, I was given nothing to do but simply admire the Ghost Gunner as its blurred, cylindrical blade cut away the gun’s trigger well with inhuman precision. At other times it seemed to alternate between carving aluminum and assigning me tasks like changing the lower receiver’s position, tightening and loosening bolts, switching the end mill to a drill bit, or even vacuuming up the aluminum shavings that piled up in and around the machine. Eventually, it felt much more like the Ghost Gunner had programmed me to be its gun-making tool than vice versa.

He had one hitch near the end of the process, but was able to get that fixed with a call to the company and a new bit of software. However, even at this point, he still needed assistance from a gunsmith. Greenberg writes:

My Ghost Gunner–milled AR-15 body, by contrast, got a stoic nod of approval. Rynder—who, allow me to stress, makes guns for a living—wasn’t exactly wowed that I’d produced a functional, essentially flawless lower receiver. But he gave me the go-ahead to build it into a full rifle. “It’s safe to assemble, safe to fire,” he said. “Yes, you could put this together and it would be ready to go.” 

Over the next hour in Rynder’s shop, I constructed my AR-15. This was harder than Forrest Gump makes it look. But I persisted, learning the process as I went by watching a YouTube video from Ares Armor a few seconds at a time. (At a couple of points, Rynder couldn’t help but point out that I had inserted a part backward or give me an unsolicited hint. I suppose this was cheating in my one-man gunsmithing experiment, but unfortunately Rynder was a very friendly, helpful, and competent person.) 

When I finally slotted in the pins to attach the upper receiver—a component that looks much more like a gun than the lower receiver and whose total lack of regulation is, frankly, bizarre—they made a pleasant chink. My AR-15 was complete.

So, once again, the author demonstrated that it was not easy to build a rifle--even where a machine basically did all the work for him. Greenberg also lists his overall expenses on each of the three attempts: the drill press method (even if it worked) would have cost $1,334 (renting the tools); the 3-D printer would have cost $3,604 (including purchase of the printer); and the Ghost Gunner cost $2,272 to build the firearm (including the purchase of the 3-D milling machine). Obviously, the costs would be less per firearm if he had built multiple firearms. However, that is the same issue I encountered with the AK, for instance, that led me to use a screw build on my kit--it was not cost effective to buy all the tools for just building a single rifle.

Anyway, Greenberg's article is an interesting read, so read the whole thing.