A CNC mill that's worth the cast iron it's made from weighs at least 2000 lbs, not to mention it takes a lot of skill to use (workholding, toolholding, setting up feeds and speeds, coolant, etc). It's very easy and very expensive to crash if you don't know what you're doing. A g-code program has to be modified to fit your machine, where the origin is, the dimensions of your rough stock, what tools it expects to have, how much material your machine can hog off.
In contrast, a pretty good 3d printer costs $500, can sit on a table, and the inevitable mistakes you will make while learning how to use it are comparatively cheap.
You can buy jigs to complete what are called 80% receivers with a drill press (and (optionally a router) - could do it on your kitchen table in an evening for a couple hundred bucks.
Gun frames can be made out of plastic or aluminum, and there are fixtures for benchtop CNC machines that can be used to make them. This is not nearly as complicated as you make it sound. I think Cody Wilson was basically selling a turnkey solution for that, maybe still is.
AFAIK they claim to still be selling general purpose CNC machines that aren't marketed as being for firearms... but only take the money and ghost customers without actually delivering anything.
High capacitance, low voltage. Computers were somewhat unusual at the time in terms of requiring a lot of current at 5 Volts. The line frequency power supplies were inefficient enough even under optimal circumstances. I've seen some giant transformers from minicomputers of the day. And those huge blue capacitors the size of beer cans.
Apple II was one of the early PC's that used a switching power supply, and it wasn't particularly reliable. I worked at an Apple repair facility, and we replaced a lot of them. But our most common repairs were due to the huge number of chip sockets and low quality gold fingers on the disk controller board edge connector. We were a government agency (county run facility serving a bunch of semi rural school districts) and didn't charge a bench fee. If we could fix it on the spot by just pressing all of the chips back into their sockets, the repair was free and we didn't even log it.
I only remember the II+, but both were dense with chips. The IIe had fewer chips as I recall. That level of complexity wasn't unheard of at the time. When the IBM PC came out, only a few of the chips were in sockets (the CPU and RAM/ROM), and people were nervous about repairability, but IBM pointed out that they had studied it to death over the years, and that the chips were more reliable than the sockets.
The actual term is "computer grade electrolytic capacitor," designed for long-term service in high current linear power supplies. You can still get them, even though few computers use linear supplies these days: https://www.mouser.com/c/passive-components/capacitors/alumi...
Mixed opinions on this. More than once I've accidentally middle clicked on a text box and sent the contents to some server. Or middle clicking the new tab button will navigate to whatever is in your clipboard, or do a web search if it isn't a URL. Hasn't been anything confidential yet, but it is possible. I try to clear the clipboard asap for this very reason.
Thanks. I just saw at BBC that it was "for a very good reason". I just thought that I'm missing some context. I guess all that's left to say is to wish you a great day.
They sell luxury goods, which people know to avoid when they care about reliability
The thing is, jeeps are even beating the BMWs when it comes to unreliability.
Yes Mercedes built that garbage for the US market because US market eats that crap. Then stellantis took it a step up and removed reliability from their vocabulary entirely - more profitable that way. I'd pick a modern VW over American garbage all day any day.
But sure, keep yourself convinced about exceptionalism of American SUVs.
In contrast, a pretty good 3d printer costs $500, can sit on a table, and the inevitable mistakes you will make while learning how to use it are comparatively cheap.