We Made Face Shields - Smarter Every Day 233

Hey! It's me, Destin. Welcome back to Smarter Every Day. I'm alone, so I can take this off. I am in a warehouse that was once used to work on the Saturn V rocket, and we have just spent the whole day tooling up a line to disinfect and sanitize 3D printed materials. Those are 3D printed materials that come in from the community; we disinfect them all through the process. We dry them off right here, and then we get them packaged up, ready to ship out to doctors and nurses.

So, I would like to make a video to show you how we did this. Because, it's one thing to make a 3D printed face shield; it's quite another to do all the logistics effort behind it in order to get it out to the community so we can fight COVID-19 together as a community. But it involves a lot of people cooperating, so I would like to show you how we got all this set up.

So, here's where we're at right now: COVID-19 is bad. There's not a miracle drug in place that'll just heal a person once they get it, and our doctors and nurses are out there day in and day out fighting this thing. Some of them are becoming exposed because they're right there with it, and so they need protective equipment. But the problem is our supply chains were so stressed because this hit everywhere all at once, globally, that if you live in a place like North Alabama like I do, you're painfully aware of the fact that most of the protective equipment is being shipped to more densely populated areas.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I'm looking around and I'm seeing all of this play out, and I'm thinking to myself: "Man, no one's comin'." It's on us, isn't it? Like this is really on us. I visualize the whole problem like this: The medical community is basically the front line of defense in our fight against the Coronavirus. So you can think of them as standing in between it and us.

These healthcare workers need to be protected from the virus, so they wear various protective gear that drastically reduces the likelihood of them getting sick themselves. Right now, we don't have enough of this protective gear. These professionals and trained technicians are not people we can just replace if they go down. You and I can't just step up when one of them gets sick, and you're not gonna get help from an outside community because the other communities are in a fight of their own against the Coronavirus.

But what we can do is help make them protective gear so they can stay in the fight. But it's not just enough to make them gear; it has to be done in a coordinated way so that the gear can actually get to the front lines where it's needed most. Makers are naturally independent thinkers, but at this moment, it doesn't do a lot of good if we're not making what the hospitals need.

Or, if we make this protection for them but don't create an efficient distribution chain to get it to the front lines, to them. If you're making anything right now, you don't need to be off just making your own thing. It's important that you get with the program. It's super important that all the makers in a community work together as a team to execute an agreed-upon plan so that nurses, doctors, and everyone getting their hands dirty right now has what they need to keep fighting for us.

Let me be clear. This video is not about making face shields for your community; this is about getting your hometown to rally together to do whatever the medical infrastructure in your specific location needs, together as a team. Even though we're kinda isolated in our own communities, the collective "we" is fully operational when it comes to protective equipment.

This is Joe Prusa; he's the guy behind the Prusa 3D printer company in the Czech Republic. They make great printers. Last month, his team designed a 3D printable face shield that can easily be fabricated using those old transparencies that your math teacher used to use on the overhead projector. This has been a huge success and has been all over the internet, and he probably heard about people 3D printing different types of protective equipment, whether it would be respirators or even valves for ventilators.

Here's the deal, though: just because you have a 3D printer doesn't mean you can just print something out and run up to the hospital and try to save the world because these people are actively fighting COVID-19 right now. Just like the visualization earlier, if everyone prints what they think is right, it's going to lead to confusion and frustration. A more efficient way to do this is to get everybody in the maker community to interact with the medical community through one touch-point, and in our case, we did it through the supply chain.

What I recommend doing is finding a leader in your area that's already communicated with a hospital and found out exactly what the hospital wants. It might be a respirator, it might be a valve, or like a test kit. In our case, it was a face shield. So this is how we got that word out and communicated it to the whole community.

Huntsville, it is time to do what Huntsville do! We're a bunch of engineers, we're a bunch of geeks, we're a bunch of scientists. It's time to help the medical community! We circulated it in our area's subreddits, among famous local bloggers, and basically we had made this call to action to anyone in our region who had a 3D printer, and we asked them to print a very specific STL file.

People that sign up just filled out a Google form; we had their email addresses, so we had 350 people 3D printing instantly, and we had the ability to communicate with them. So I've talked to a lot of people doing this in their cities, and they all say the same thing. Once they established this communication network, there's two types of people: The vast majority of people just do it. They're like, "That's the file? I'm in, let's do it right now."

But there's this other kind of person. They're like, "Well, actually... we could be more efficient if we, like, ran it this way and, you know, we could do it with this hole-puncher or whatever..." Don't be that guy! Just don't. Whatever the file is... print the file. That's all you've got to do, man!

And here's the deal about this: you're right. It is probably more efficient; it's probably better—a quicker runtime. Whatever it is... yes, got it. The doctors requested this, so we should all just do it. So whatever your idea is—unless it's a matter of safety—just get with the program and do what everybody else is doing.

So here's another thing you're going to want to do. While your whole team is printing, you're going to want a couple of pockets of research within your group thinking about two weeks out. For example, 3D printing is great, but it takes about three hours for every part. Injection molding, however, kicks out a part every 25 seconds.

Which is why when a guy named Chris, who owns an injection molding shop, replied to our call for help in the Google form, we wrote the check for materials, and he worked through the night to design a mold so that his toolmaker Jeremy could start machining the mold the next day. One injection mold machine can do the job of hundreds of printers: like a thousand parts per shift.

The challenge is that it takes several days to make the molds. So use 3D printing as a stop-gap to get you to the injection mold solution, and then you can pivot with your 3D printers to another design that your hospitals need. So we kind of shot first, and we asked questions later. We knew the doctors wanted face shields, so we had 350 people printing those, but we still didn't know how to collect these things, and we also didn't know how to disinfect them.

We have to assume that every single face shield that the community delivers potentially has COVID-19 on it. So this is when we reached out, and we discovered that there was a guy in Sacramento named Pooch. I got his phone number from Joel Telling—the 3D Printing Nerd—but Pooch was an open book. He's created this whole thing called Operation Shields Up, and he's about two weeks further along in the process than we are.

I'll just basically start at the beginning from our intake—we're actually between shifts right now—which is good. You're going to need shipping and receiving, so this is like intake. This person here is cataloging who sent us what. This is the disinfection line. This is all our stuff right now—I told you I just got a pallet—this is all waiting to be disinfected.

We're starting here with a detergent rinse, then it goes through a water rinse, 20 minutes in here, get a couple kitchen timers. There's no doubling the concentration to speed up the process. It's dwell time that really matters on that. One more rinse after the 20 minutes is up. Then get yourself a rack—I have a bunch of shop fans under it blowing at us. After it dries off over there: packaging and stuff. You're going to want some poly-bags; probably that seems to be the best thing because they've been through sanitation, they get bagged up right away, sealed, and then the bag goes inside the box.

You know, basic checklist, basic assembly guide. We're setting up a GitHub; this can all be open-source for anybody to use as a model for rapid response manufacturing, or whatever we want to call this. You're a week ahead and an order of magnitude more organized than we are. You know, before you jumped on, I said every 24 hours is like another evolution for us.

Right now, Pooch is my sensei. His name's Allen. Allen is amazing. He's telling us what he did, how he learned the lesson, and he's hoping that we can improve on it so we can pass that along. This guy right here in the Zoom call with Pooch took what Pooch said about disinfecting the parts and he connected us with a local ministry who got it all set up per CDC guidelines and just made it all happen.

Pooch also recommended something that was very interesting to me. He said it's important to team up with a local medical society. And the reason you want to do that is like, for example, the same thing that was happening with the large metropolitan areas taking all the stuff, right? You don't want to have your stuff go to one area when you might have these smaller practices out in the county in a rural area, for example. They need this stuff too because they're on the front lines. That's what the medical society can do for you.

They act as a referee to make sure that whatever you're producing as a group gets distributed fairly. We decided to do a drive-thru drop-off point for the entire community's 3D printed parts. Which is kind of tough to do and also maintain social distancing. We used baskets so people could drop their stuff off. Everyone who made parts pre-soaked them in a bleach solution prior to dropping them off to begin the disinfection process.

In two hours, we collected 3,800 parts, which was incredible. And you might think you have an idea of what a person that owns a 3D printer looks like. This is the most diverse group of people I have possibly ever seen. It's like a character from every genre of movie showed up and deposited their stash, large or small, and they were all united in the exact same cause. We wanted to protect the medical community.

There's this legitimate thing that happens to me if I see people from all different walks and differing opinions and stuff... If they all come together and they work for a common cause, that's good; I get emotional. I just do. Don't know what the deal is, but I do. This was one of those moments for me. I was so proud to be a human, and I was so proud to be from my community.

Ok, back to the task at hand. Because this stuff is going out into doctors’ offices and hospitals, we have to make sure that there's nothing on it. That there's no chance that the virus is here at all. So we had to go all the way through the complete disinfection process.

A group of nurses and dental hygienists came to save the day. They understand sterile fields. I texted Pooch, and he did a down-and-dirty audio recording and sent it to me, so I could play it for the nurses and hygienists so they figure out how Operation Shields Up did all this in Sacramento.

We then walked into the room, and over the course of a few hours, they developed an entire system to disinfect the 3D-printed parts. This part was awesome; the engineers just got out of the way, and we built what these ladies told us to. And by the end of the day, we were delivering parts to hospitals for the first time.

So we used today to optimize everything. A volunteer named Elly came in and used her graphic design skills to make instruction sheets for us—we have disclaimer sheets that we put inside all the pouches, etc. We have a system to build parts, we have a system to sanitize parts while maintaining social distancing. Rebecca wrote a procedure for everything in the room, so we can have any volunteer jump in at any time and do any job well.

So at this point, we need volunteers to actually work this process; we also need all the doctors’ offices around the area to know that this is an option for them now. They can get these shields. We need to coordinate, which is why I called Matt. He's been an awesome volunteer at every event I've ever been to in town, and he knows absolutely everyone.

So Matt just showed me how to make a battle plan. This is how you do it. You did this in Katrina, didn't you? I did this for Hurricane Katrina, yeah. We had no clue what we were doing; the hurricane came through, we didn't have a choice but to step up and make things happen, and so we just took a big whiteboard and wrote it out and started bringing volunteers in, and when it was all said and done, we had moved over 10 million dollars worth of relief supplies that reflected all up and down the eastern seaboard down into the disaster area.

This is whoever is going to be on the front lines; figure out what those requests are, basically doing triage and figuring out what's the priority on that so when we're ready to ship out, we know who we're shipping to and why we're shipping to them. We’ve got the shields which are coming in; we've got the headbands which are being 3D printed by a lot of people locally. Businesses are shipping the gear.

Then we're also moving into the respirators. On media: being able to explain to people what we're doing and why we're doing it so they can understand that it works. So we're working on what our channels are and what our points of contacts are there. Then the facilities here: we've got multiple things going on. All the stuff we've been setting up yesterday and today to make this happen.

Then on the volunteers, all the signups, release forms, scheduling, vetting, figuring out, like, you know we have great nurses who have come in, and they know what they're doing, and so we have that kind of piece and then we shift down to the other part, which is not the last part, but just happens to be on this wall, and that's the funding. Because all of this stuff is going to take some money.

And we've got a lot of people who have jumped in offering services to do great things. But we need to be able to purchase some of the supplies and stuff we need, so we want to have good vehicles for people to be able to fund this effort as we work on it. It's a lot.

So here's the point. Assume no one is coming. If they do, that's great! But assume they're not. Try to find the leadership that is already in place in your area. The community leaders, then try to amplify what they're doing. And then whatever you learn, pass that along to the next community who needs that information in their battle.

When I first started trying to figure out what I could do to help, I needed a way to quickly get with the people that were working solutions and get it done. So I have a proposal: whatever your city is, right now, you're fighting COVID. You are! So use the hashtag. If you just tweet it out, maybe you could quickly link up to other people.

For example, if you're in Austin, Texas; Huntsville, Alabama. We even made the website HuntsvilleFightingCovid.com, and what that lets us do is it lets people sign up to 3D print. If they want to help us do that, they can sign up to volunteer if there's something they can do to help us. They can also sign up to get medical equipment if they're part of the medical community.

And of course, donate: they can help us buy supplies. I don't know what the infrastructure or communication network looks like in your town, but from what I can tell, we're not very unified right now. So if you can unify quickly, in your city, at the community level, and start fighting COVID with #[your city]FightingCOVID, I think we've got a better shot.

Because this is a global problem, but I believe it is most effectively fought on a local level. To do all this, you're going to need a team with a bunch of different skills. But the good news here is most of this stuff can be done without ever leaving your home.

I want to show you some of the people in #HuntsvilleFightingCOVID, and I want to show you what they brought to the table to help do this as a team. Jennifer and I are heading up coordination. She's awesome. This whole thing was Trent's idea, and he's literally building it. Carson built the website, and he's command and control. He makes everything happen with these monitors, and he's also hilarious.

Alison made this whole thing legit: she did all the paperwork and administration. Jeremy handles our mechanical designs, and Zack at Mission Driven Ministries handles the donations. Ben's a YouTuber with a channel called Authen.tech, and he's been the liaison with our local media. Profmesh is using software to optimize our distribution.

Ellie's only been in town for four months, but she's using her graphic design skills to help us make amazing instructions for the doctors and nurses. Pammy is helping us stay connected to the city, and Rebecca wrote all our procedures. Two project engineers, Jered and the other Jeremy, are planning our pivots to new designs. When parts print wrong, Matt makes them work. There are tons of volunteer drivers like Austin.

And Chris and Jeremy are working around the clock to make the injection mold happen. And that list doesn't even scratch the surface. The whole sanitizing crew of nurses and hygienists are amazing, and of course, the whole maker community who's printing as fast as they can.

This is something you can do for your city, right now. The key is that you've got to work together. Now go find your team. Remember, #[your city]FightingCOVID. I'm Destin. You're getting smarter every day. Go wash your hands. Have a good one. Bye!