SCRANTON, Pa. — The low hum of machines and the slow, patient process of creation.
That's what greets Drs. Mojib Saei and Geng Liu each day inside the University of Scranton's 3D printing lab in its Department of Mechanical Engineering.
The two engineering professors regularly work with these specialized machines to teach their students how to use them.
Here, they build figurines, assorted knick-knacks, or even mechanized legs.
"Once you have the model, from the computer model to the real part, the difficulty level for a student to learn is 30 minutes," said Dr. Geng Liu.
However, this is the type of technology that authorities say was used to build parts of the firearm used in last week's shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City.
That type of firearm is called a "ghost gun," because it can be put together at home with parts that generally don't have serial numbers. That makes it harder to trace and fairly easy to make.
Parts of it can even be made at home. That's where a 3D printer comes in.
The two engineering professors tell us that parts of a gun, like its polymer frame, can be made in a 3D printer. All it takes is the design, which can be downloaded, roughly $1,000 for the equipment, and about 20 hours for the construction.
But not every part of the weapon can be printed.
The professors tell Newswatch 16 that a gun entirely made with a 3D printer would fire only once, if at all. The polymer material is just too weak to survive contact with a bullet.
"The real mechanism of the gun, the actual shooting part of the gun, it definitely cannot be 3D printed," said Dr. Mojib Saei.
Saei says the weapon would still need metal parts, and according to court paperwork, the gun that police say they found with Luigi Mangione did have a metal slide or top part.
And experts say a metal barrel leaves behind marks on metal bullets. That's where ballistics comes in.
The New York City Police Department reported Wednesday that three shell casings recovered at the scene of last week's shooting in Midtown match the gun reportedly in Mangione's possession.