There is no shortage of awesome weapons from science fiction movies and comics that thousands of nerds all over the world would love to have replicas of. One of the big nerds personal favorites is the Lawgiver from the classically terrible 1995 Judge Dredd movie and thankfully someone was kind enough to create a 3D printable version of it.
In the classic British comic book anthology 2000 AD the long running Judge Dredd series followed the adventures of an acerbic law enforcement officer from a dystopian future. Judge Dredd and his fellow “Judges” have been given complete authority to investigate crimes, arrest, convict, sentence and even execute criminals on the spot, often all at the same time. No, he wasn’t a police officer in St Louis, he patrolled the grimy streets of Mega-City One where hundreds of millions of citizens lived in massive, crime-ridden cities.
A Judge’s sidearm was called a Lawgiver, and while many different iterations have been created, many fans – or maybe just me – of the character believe that the coolest version was from the otherwise terrible Sylvester Stallone movie adaptation from 1995. While the 2012 Judge Dredd movie is a much, much better movie, the Lawgiver that he used wasn’t nearly as cool.
Now when I say the Stallone movie is terrible, I mean the movie is really terrible. His sidekick was Rob Schneider for cripes sake! I’m too lazy to look it up, but I’m almost positive that geniuses from MIT have created a mathematical proof that illustrates how any movie where Rob Schneider appears for more than a few seconds is incapable of being a good movie. I might be making that up, but I’m also pretty sure no one is going to doubt me enough to try to prove me wrong.
Anyways, like I said the one redeemable thing from that movie was its version of the Lawgiver, and My Mini Factory user James Specketer was kind enough to design a 3D printable version that looks amazingly authentic. I’m reasonably sure that he did it only for me.
The 3D printable Lawgiver prints in three separate batches of parts. All together it will take a standard 3D printer about 26 hours total printing time and use about 300 grams of PLA filament. Specketer painted his to be authentic, but it would still look pretty cool unpainted in a single color.
Now in the comic stories and the movies the Lawgiver was only capable of being operated by a Judge, who had their specific palmprint programmed into it. If anyone else tried to use it the weapon tended to explode a little bit along with whichever hand was holding it. I do not recommend that some of you clever makers out there try and include that functionality into it. Although, there is a part of me that thinks it would be really cool if you could!
