This was written in conjunction with the Marine Raiders and Code Talkers Monument project.

All of my life I have been involved with rifles and pistols. Like most everything in my life, I taught myself. I taught myself to row and understand the sea, to hunt and finally to shoot. Shooting is intuitive when to squeeze. I was a loved feral child. I grew up on a small stump farm, cows, goats, horses, ducks, chickens, many of you know the place or places like it. We lived near the shores

of Puget Sound.

When I ventured into the woods I took my rifle or If I was heading out into Puget Sound’s salmon filled waters in my 10’ wooden skiff, I took my pop gear for trolling.

You see in our house my 22 single shot always stood by our back door and I always had a pocket full of 22 longs; many of them from time to time, much to my mother’s horror, went through the washing machine.

I was a child of the second world war. It was all war up until I was 6 -7 years old. Our childhood games were war games our clothes were camouflage colors. I had my first gun given to me when I was five by my uncle Bill who was gassed in France in WWI. It was an old rusted pump shot gun that didn’t pump or shoot, it was found on a corner of our acreage stuck barrel first into the ground as a survey marker. Most of my early memories are disparate images of WW-2 vintage. Squadrons of planes overhead; the occasional blimp; war ships out on the sound; soldiers marching down our gravel country road; news headlines with 5 inch font about this battle or that; it was all war, all olive drab. This was all I knew at that age. Guns are a big part of that! What I am saying is that to build a BAR it does help if you love guns, and I did and still do.

The weapons of my youth were varied, they were mostly trades of one sort or another. My first working rifle was that single shot .22 you see there leaning against the back door. My older brother, Harold, who was in the army ACS, Alaskan Communication System, bought it from an Aleut Eskimo up in Unalaska. The stock was gashed and marred where my brother used it to break up a fight between two crazed huskies in bloodied snow in front of a bar. It didn’t have a shoulder plate. This rifle was very accurate as long as you aimed slightly to the left and slightly up, never a miss, you had to “feel” the target, tin can or dove.

A few of my other weapons were, in no particular order, a 16 gage browning pump with inlaid roughly carved ivory geese, another gift from my brother from Unalaska bought from an Aleut fisherman, his seal gun, slugs or double o. I had a Remington four-ten single shot, given to me by my grandmother who used it on coyotes in North Dakota, a Winchester 16 gage over and under, a very sweet little side by side 12 gage dove gun with 26 inch barrels. I also had an OLD Belgium 10 gage that we tied to a stump to fire. It had damask barrels. It wasn’t safe. I’m not really sure as I think about it, if we even put exactly the right sized shells in that old pipe. I had a British 303, a Japanese Arisaka, which I never could find ammo for, a WW-2 German 8mm Mauser, which was my deer rifle also my favorite. It was highly accurate, so much so that I could take the head off a pigeon perched atop a 100’ fir tree. My mother was thankful for these gifts with out lead in the breast. I also had various pistols. My favorite was a 3 1/2 inch barrel 357 Smith and Wesson single action, similar to General Paton’s, he, Patton was also my “Son of a Bitch.” What a warrior.

l had other weapons but this is supposed to be a story about printing a BAR, though just one other mention. I also had a deadly double action Colt 45 which one fine day I traded for a Leica camera. Good trade that one. It changed my life, but that’s another story.

As I think about it what I am relaying to you is how to print a BAR with 3-D technology, but also hugely important in the world of art is that other thing called experience. What is that? It is everything I have told you and more- Belief.

I have always loved shooting but how could I have ever known then that one day I would be printing, did I say printing? a WW-2 classic 14 inch BAR rifle.

Conversely if I wanted to make a pistol growing up I carved it out of Ivory soap along with a tooth or two, how times change.

With all of the iron I had growing up, to make a rifle out of plastic was, well, unheard of. Especially so since when I was a kid plastic was essentially worthless. It always broke; you couldn’t even glue it, though glue in those days was also pathetic. The only plastics I knew were the glowing ivory colored knobs on the dashboard of my father’s old Mercury, yellow and stained as my grandfather’s Meerschaum pipe.

Wait a minute though, there was the time I took my whole plastic Revell naval fleet, which I had taken about a year to construct, carriers, battlewagons, cruisers, etc and when our vegetable garden was flooding one grey sodden rainy winter day, I took that whole fleet and set them adrift on the high seas. That is the high seas between last years corn stalks and pea vines.

We, my brother and I, then scurried about seventy-five yards up to our

house and into my upstairs bedroom, threw open the window sash and looking down in to the flooded south pacific better known as our garden, we proceeded to sink the fleet. My grandma’s house which was about 15 degrees off from the “fleet” looked upon this naval bombardment in the vegetable garden with great distain, and promised to tell my dad about the whole incident when he returned home that night from the shipyard.

All right I have kept you long enough, on to the printing of the BAR. You can see here that printing this BAR is part of a love story of mine, maybe yours too, that is with firearms.

Also it is easy to see experience and contacts are hugely important to the creative process, upper level awareness is needed.

The first thing to know when you enter into the world of 3-D printing is that you enter into the world of computers. The computer is subservient, but essential to achieving your desired goal. Which is this object, what ever it may be, that we want to create, it is here where pure creative thought can happen.

In the land of computers there is every kind of information and nearly all of it is available, an endless array of purchasable objects. Look around you where you are reading this and most probably it has all been through a computer and more and more likely also through a 3-D printer. The world of 3-D is the computer conduit to heart valves, jewelry, aircraft parts, hip replacement parts, auto parts and, of course, refined details of the BAR, and so much more, endlessly more, frightingly more, you can print a grenade or a peanut butter sandwich.

The process along the way is fascinating. We build the BAR from a cyber block of NOTHING, in goes the visa card and out comes the outside shell image of the BAR as well as its guts, IF you purchased them also, its all for sale.

Remember here though, that data bits arrive after having passed a plethora of permutations. This is to say they, the bits, get beat up and altered along the digital pathway. Transmutation.

My 3-D world is a world of team work without which I would be dead in the water. At Form 3-D foundry where I do my 3-D shaping, discovery and printing there are scanners, finishers, patina experts, hot wax masters and master designers, to name a few, excellence is the name of the game. All of them are committed and conversant with computers, a type of second language. They are also all artists in their own right and excellent at what they do, all having the “eye”. There is no room for dead wood in this group, this is poetry, each word must count.

Corbin is one of my most valued partners in our “Foundry” in Portland, Oregon. Corbin sits all day at his bank of computers with digital brushes, styluses, and cyber pencils, creating the most exacting details and exquisite forms of most anything. In other words Corbin is a master.

For our BAR we take a “stock image”, i.e. one we purchased online. We modify this stock design for some days until we reach the perfection that the Browning Arms company, Corbin, and I meant it to have. This means measuring everything. Remember here, we are REPLICATING an object, the BAR, not creating a unique new original creation, so we measure and compare constantly we have, so to speak, a road map, a template.

If we are CREATING an object we most likely wouldn’t measure anything, think abstract paintings. Though on another level chaos can be measured.

Time has a way of wearing away sharp edges and corners even with data. Just look in the mirror, are we data?

Even in the digital world things get softer, rounder, blurrier. Believe it or not, my astro-biology friend, tells me that even shadows cause wear. Humm? Exfoliation?

Corbin tells me that when he gets many stock images they have shoddy workmanship and it makes him grumpy, since he then has to “clean” them up.

Every creation is an endless chain of decisions, carefully pored over to arrive at what one thinks is his/ her ideal goal. I say ‘think’ their ideal goal, because the world of distant future thought and image making is always exponentially expanding and the question is always when to stop.

In our case with our BAR we know to stop where the Browning Arms Company stopped. We are not adding parts and gewgaws to

our BAR, but trying to achieve the slim and effective perfection that Browning demanded. Although my dear WW-II raider friend told me that when he hit the beaches and jungles of Talagai he modified his BAR by ripping off the tripod and the handle instantly saying they got snagged on every danged thing in the jungle.

Never do you want perfection more than when you are creating armament.

Creating and printing this rife I want perfection, exactly what Browning arms manufacturers wanted, demanded and got, no jamming parts.

So many new and unique objects can be created with 3-D. In the past to create some of these objects it would have taken a lifetime of experience to achieve, if ever.

With the right data I can make you that heart valve I talked about, how mysterious. 3-D is getting closer to perfection.

There are many new ways to print besides epoxy, there is gold, silver, many metals and even concrete. Each year, smaller and less costly printers are coming out. With all of this new gear, of course comes many new ideas. The Marines have recently 3D-printed a 30 foot combat foot bridge in one day where-as the old way took five days, 3-D is quick.

Speed, of course, is essential in war.

We can now, with extreme efficiency, print a composite BAR rifle that fires regular ammunition as well as a Klashnikov, or that little snub nosed forty five that I traded for the Leica. The printed Leica and the printed forty-five will actually shoot. I have the feeling we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Remember it’s nearly ALL on the web somewhere with the rare exception of the most esoteric objects.

3-D technology can take you a long way especially for architectural work, medical work, objects that have already been created, that have a template.

These data bits of information on your favorite subject are for the most part there. Want a lens cap for your 37′ Plymouth tail light? Easy. The fun begins when you enter into the either, i.e. creation. There is no GPS, no up no down, no here, no there no color no sound, a white canvas is at least white, the color of infinity.

Remember our BAR sculpture is from an idea, it is created from data bits and thoughts, we know the language and have a “template,” this is huge.

But for the creative art world we still need an original IDEA.

3-D is not cold fusion. We need to start with something. Many people have the misguided idea that with 3-D they can push a button and out will come their dream creation, not so. Though the pathway once identified is a cornucopia of expanding refinements.

Nearby you see images of my “Old Fisherman”. This creation at this stage is clay and various other materials, steel, rope, shell, glass, etc. I am constructing this work by hand, using what ever I can find to make a meaningful sculpture, old technology.

The way I am proceeding with this old fisherman is similar to the same way I have been creating most every other sculpture I have created. Indeed the way sculpture has been created for centuries EXCEPT now in this case, I have a computer up my sleeve, with a 3D printer attached, a synthesized old and new.

Once I have this proud old Fisherman created and scanned into my computer, I can shorten him, elongate him, torque him, add to him anything I feel like, give him arthritis, scars, you name it. For this I use digital paintbrushes, and digital pencils which shape pixels. Without the 3-D none of this would basically, be possible.

After this I can cast him in bronze if I choose.

Artists through out eternity have been among the first to embrace new technology so as to create new and unique art.

3-D gives us new opportunities, what a marvelous gift. However recall, one has to create something first to have an object to 3-D manipulate and print.

There are a myriad of ways to create. Childish scribbles which can become 30 foot abstracts are still childish scribbles only bigger scribbles. This is to say that the same as with most any tool, one can easily create drivel. It is vital to remember that when first looking at bad art you will know everything about that kind of art in the first few moments. It will never offer more because it doesn’t have more. Great art conversely will continue to reveal its greatness forever, i.e. even with the best of tools we can create junk or genius.

Corbin sits on a high stool with screens around him and his dog at his feet. He has images that we have purchased, as well images of my own and his own making on the screen. On the screen we twist shapes, compare them, meld them, revise, refine them, paint them and constantly with diligence hunt down the perfection we are seeking.

We minimize greatly the size of our purchased stock BAR images on the screen. Corbin does this to get the extreme close up view that is demanded for our detailed inspection. Think of tooling, looking at it through a magnifying glass, every scratch, pit, untoward aspect we can see and constantly correct to perfection. We could fly to the moon on this technology. This attention to detail would also provide

the smooth articulation you would need for a smooth hip joint or?

For instance here is a very close up view of the bi-pod connection on the BAR. Is it half inch or ten feet, it doesn’t matter it is all scaled exactly same?

The legs for the bipod on our 14 inch model, to scale, are only 3/16th inch in diameter, and yet in the reduced scale we can still create a tube down the center into which we will insert a stainless steel rod for strength. This is vir- tually, for the most part, not possible without this technol- ogy. We want the strength so that our 14 inch BAR can stand on a desk, hence the stainless steel insert.

From this data I can make a 1″ BAR or a 40′ BAR or? It’s all in the computer and all to scale.

Once we have refined all of the drawings we are ready to move the data to the printer. This is, of course, after paying heed to the carpenter’s admonition, check twice, cut once.

It is here that we enter into the most technical aspect of this process. This is an exciting ride.

Form 3-D foundry’s go-to 3-D printing technology is an industrial scale binder jet. A binder jet is an additive manufacturing process in which a liquid binding (think glue) agent is selectively deposited to join powder particles. Layer upon acrylic layer of this “glue” and powder are then bonded to form an object. (BAR) The printer is about the size of half a VW bug. It prints by depositing a very thin layer of acrylic powder about the thickness of a cat’s hair onto a platform followed by a printhead which precisely deposits microscopic droplets of glue that build the desired object (a BAR in our case) one cross section per layer at a time. For visualization think perhaps, of a stalagmite or an intertwined tree root, equally possible. This is the beauty of the process, all is nearly all possible.

The platform automatically lowers a distance equal to the thickness of the powder layer and repeats the process over and over until it has completed its program, i.e. until our BAR is printed, created in 3-D. Because of the jet’s large build envelope, i.e. it is a big machine, it can produce 19000 cubic inches of 3-D parts in the few days it takes to complete 3000 layers of print. That’s about 166 layers per vertical inch. The speed, build volume, and comparatively low cost of material makes it ideal for producing large size monumental sculpture or large quantities of highly detailed miniature sized sculpture, i.e. our BARS, or that heart valve, hip joint, aircraft part or name it? My design work and much other creative work is done at my home studio in Southworth, Washington, while my 3-D printing work is done at Form 3-D foundry in Portland, Oregon, some 250 miles south.

My bronze casting and Patina work is done in Enterprise, Oregon, 450 miles to the east of Portland in what is one of God’s most beau- tiful places. This is the home land of the famous warrior chief, Chief Joseph, of the Nez Perce, and the incredible Wallowa valley.

Here, nestled into the landscape, is Parks Foundry, where some of the greatest works of classical and abstract art are produced anywhere on the planet. Steve Parks is a classicist and has customers worldwide.

It is here that all the painstaking time we took at the computer comes to be an exacting 3 dimension bronze sculptural object, our BAR. In some cases when an object is smaller it can be taken directly from the printer and cast in one single pour of bronze. On larger works there are numerous printings and many pours, imagine futuristic po- tato chips of bronze. The pieces are torqued and twisted, bent and layered, pierced, all tongue and groove; they are perfect and hence sleeved one piece into the next like a Swiss watch.

When raw bronze pieces can be assembled this perfectly they can be welded together perfectly as welt. This is alt made possible by the master designers at Form 3-D foundry and by 3-0 Technology, and the incredible school of old time hi tech master metal smiths at Parks Bronze.

In the old days a great deal of work getting a sculptural object ready to cast, was done in wax, the French Cire Perdue or lost wax method. The lost wax method is industrially polluting while by contrast 3-D is very green and by multiples, way more efficient. When the casting and then the welding is complete, the weld is chased, i.e. made smooth then buffed more until we reach the type of surface we are searching for i.e. in the case of our BAR, smooth and no weld seams visible.

This seems a long explanation but this is the path. We now have a complete and exact 14″ replica of a full sized BAR. Our completed polymer print is light buff plastic in color. What color is our BAR?

I’m remembering now all of my old guns and they were all different in color, and wear. I would imagine a BAR would be the same. Creating art such as the BAR is all about research. Every aspect must be perfect.

Having said that, this is only when we are trying to perfectly replicate an object, such as the BAR, it hasn’t originated with us we are only copying it, did I say only?

It by now should be apparent that when many of us conjured up the idea of 3-D print- ing technology in the past that we seemed to think it is automatic start to finish. Sort of like push a button in your brain and one on the printer and poof out comes our thought. But as you see it is not automatic, it is all conscious decision. Each step along the way must point to our creative goal. The steps come from everywhere in our own memory and a vast array of experiences and of course all over the web.

After the bronze is cast, it is bright bronze in color, brightness that will not last by the way, It turns dark chocolate after contact with the atmosphere.

Once more our BAR is inspected by the crew. Is it perfect?, yes it is perfect.

Our BAR then goes to Bart the supreme patina master. It is here in Bart’s steamy, chemical, acidic, hot torched hut that the sur- face comes to life. BART and I will study perhaps for days. I will put every color

and shadow consideration that I know to the test. There are many tricks to tease the eye. I know that whatever Bart and I come up with Bart will be able to torch it, apply just the right chemicals and carry me to the color palette I am seeking.

Chemicals on metal famously migrate. In some ways however the difference isn’t that great, its all color and shadow. Sculpture is all about shadow and color.

Finally we will put a water based lacquer on the BAR, put it into a unique and special protective container and it’s ready for shipping.

However you can see that the 3-D printing is a small yet important part of the sculpture. At the end of the day you see the hundreds of small and large personal decisions. Maybe you hunted as a kid so you know a little about guns, maybe you were or are in the military so you know a bit more or maybe you are a Raider and then you know a hell of a lot more. If you are military you know how to shoot, but quite likely you don’t know how to make a plastic BAR or AR-15, that fires real ammunition.

What is available to the artist/creator is absolutely an open book. Hopefully this article will help you to understand this exciting world. This is harder to explain than I initially thought it would be, primarily because, as is most often the case, it isn’t the tool it is, and I hope I have made the case, it’s the operator/creator. All of this disparate information, and a lifetime of experience, and a highly talented team, is what it takes to make a BAR with a 3-D printer. What fun!

Douglas Charles Granum douglasgranum@hotmail.com