Covid-19 Face Shields

The Idea:

Written on May 1st 2020

When Covid-19 first struck it disrupted our entire way of life: no more in-person school, meeting with friends, politics, healthcare, etc. There was little that I could do to help, and this feeling of helplessness made me extremely uncomfortable. If the world is gonna stop, that doesn’t mean that I also need to stop, I need to pick up the pace and make the best of my quarantine. I looked back through everything that was happening to see if I could do anything: schools closed, can’t do anything about it; friends socially distanced, hang out using the internet; politics, advocacy won’t do much given the circumstances; healthcare, well maybe there is something that I can do here...

I started scouring the internet looking for ways to help front line workers...make masks, volunteer, print face shields, donate, advocate—wait go back, print face shields? I can do that! I had just gotten my 3D printer, and my lust for printing things was not even close to being satiated. I started my research by going to prusaprinters.org and seeing what the good folks at Prusa Research were doing. I was blown away by the impact they had, close to 100,000 face shields were going to be delivered in the next few weeks! I suddenly became extremely inspired, this was something I feel compelled to do, not for my sake, but for the sake of others! I immediately started sketching what I needed to do to organize something of the sort, during the course of my research, I stumbled upon the website of Makers Nexus, one of my friends who also had a 3D printer said that he used to go there and knew that they were doing something with Covid-19. After filling out all of the required forms I had my task, make as many face shields as possible.

The Execution:

Written on May 4th 2020 (May the Force be with You)

I just received the files to print and each of these parts for the face shields take ~20 hours! That means that I can only do ~40 or so a day, which is horrible efficiency. The slicer profile they provided brings this up to ~52 in 24 hours, let me see if I can make this better....

Well that was pretty fun, trying different settings to try to increase the printing speed of the mask. One of the 3D printing YouTubers that I watch, CNC kitchen, published an extremely helpful video with a lot of helpful tips and tricks. Using these and making a deep dive on the settings of the slicer I was able to boost the number of masks from the Maker Nexus profile of 37 parts every ~17 hours to an astonishing 37 parts every 7 hours and 28 min!

Here are the tweaks that I made to speed up the process:

Remove all infill - the closely spaced line needs to be approached slowly, rather than using solid infill, use 0%.
Max out the perimeters - By setting this to an obscene number (I set it to 8), the entire model will only be consisting of perimeters, these being long curves allowing the printer to accelerate to a much higher average velocity.
Bottom Solid Layer = 3 ⇒ 2 - This is all that is needed, this is a necessary slowdown.
Increase the Layer height (use variable) - Allows for 0.32 thick layers where there is low detail and this goes down to 0.2 mm layers when detail is needed. Manually controlling this gives unparalleled quality and plaid speeds.
Disable Skirt - Manually watch the first layer, allows me to fit one more part.
Add brim & turn up first layer speed - brim adds ~3 min, speed increase removes ~15+ min. Need to do both for reliability.
Tune Speeds - Push machine to the limits (~80-120 mm/s)
Increase Extrusion Width - The secret sauce allows you to have thicker layers (in the XY direction). It also allows you to:
Remove gap fill - Takes too long, machine needs to go <30 mm/s. This reduced ~4 hours with Extrusion Width!
Increase Temperatures - Stronger layer adhesion, reduces surface quality but this doesn’t matter
Level Bed - Ensures perfect adhesion.
Set up a schedule for printing, and count filament usage - This allows the machine to pump out as many parts without having filament runouts. My schedule was 7:30AM —> 3:00PM —> 10:30 PM—> Repeat. I can do 8 prints on a spool.

With all of these tweaks I am able to do 3 sets of 37 each day, even accounting for the occasional failure this means that I can do ~110 a day—a HUGE step up from the ~52 that Makers Nexus’s profile allowed me to do. After sharing this profile with others, people were also able to drastically increase the number of face shields that they can produce each day. After printing my trial batch, I dropped this off today and got some blue filament to print more from. Here is a short video of my printer printing the initial black batch.

My second batch was a batch of ~300. This is one of the last batches that I took a photo of.

Written May 12th 2020

The friend that initially informed me about Makers Nexus just let me know that he has also been printing components! Together, we recruited another one of our mutual friends and we all have been trading tips, discussing techniques, and just talking about things every so often. Our goal as a collective is to print ~3k components. I also set up a camera for monitoring, this camera can also do timelapses, though it isn’t meant to do this. I have attached all current (and will attach all future face shield timelapses) at the end of this post.

Written on May 20th 2020

Since the last entry I have delivered 2 batches as I got 2 boxes of filament (you can see them in the previous picture). This brings the total that I have delivered to 150 (initial black) + 297 (blue) + 278 (pink) + 296 (pink). This means that I have delivered enough parts for ~1021 face shields! Barring the ~5% failure rate of these, that means that I have delivered ~969 components! I picked up 1 more box of pink and a box of white and will start printing once I get home! (This was written on my phone on the car ride back from Maker’s Nexus).

Written on May 26th 2020

I just received an email from Makers Nexus stating that they have fulfilled ALL of their orders! My final tally (with the batch that I just dropped off) is 1207 components! While I didn’t contribute as much as some others did, people who had larger printers and multiple printers, I feel very proud knowing that I contributed ~1.2k components of the ~160k 3D printed components needed (each shield is 2 printed components and one visor, one of the printed components was replaced with an injection molded component around May 16th). Of the components that I contributed, I contributed ~1k of the ~80k components that they received!

Written on May 27th 2020

After speaking with my friends, we ended up producing a bit more than our goal of 3k! This is really exciting for me and I feel much more confident going into the summer Covid-19! We have all played a part in helping healthcare workers stay safer in the front lines. I am more motivated than ever to continue using my 3D printer to create new and exciting things, things that benefit not only myself, but thousands of others. This experience is one that I will never forget and has cemented to me the power of a 3D printer.

Final Batch Photo: