In response to the quick and drastic needs of our local healthcare workers, the community of St. Louis makers and makerspaces have united to help fabricate much-needed hardware for nurses, EMTs and doctors.
Led by maker David Cervantes, Face Shield Initiative STL is composed of volunteer community leaders from MADE Makerspace, Inventor Forge, and Arch Reactor. Together we are pooling the maker resources at hand to help the 1st responder teams, doctors, nurses, and medical staff by fabricating face shields. There is an overwhelming demand or face shields used to protect the facemasks in which medical/responder staff has a finite quantity.
We are responding to this demand by activating local makerspaces and individual makers with access to 3D printers to print an open-source harness made by Prusa Research. Volunteer makers with access to laser cutters or Cricuts are helping by cutting out the transparent PETG face shield film. Volunteers are also aiding by shuttling the materials required to print the harness, the film, and delivery to those in need.
We have now pooled over 15 printers and 6 laser cutters so we can pump out our initial goal of 300 face shields for Barnes-Jewish Hospital. We want to help as many health care workers and hospitals as we can. There has been an overwhelming request to help other medical centers and cities; we want to help as many health care workers and
hospitals as we can. The St. Louis community has already donated over $800 in funds to help supplement our material and transportation costs.
We are restricted by time, material resources, and budgets. This entire operation is a bootstrap effort; every volunteer has used their personal funds and resources in an uncertain economic climate to help others. We are making progress obtaining the PETG face shields, but still require a solid supply. While our maker community continues to
run their 3D printers around the clock, we will quickly run out of PETG and PLA filament, and the elastic bands used to aid securing the shields will run low.
We delivered the first batch of prototypes today, March 22nd, for product refinement to doctors, nurses and first responders. We plan to begin our crowd-sourced mass production efforts by the end of this week. If you’d like to participate in this call to action, please reach out the folks below.
Financial Donations:
Operations
David Cervantes, David@Cervantesdesigns.com
Material Donations
George Fetters, gfetters@gmail.com
Communications
Emily Elhoffer, eelhoffer@gmail.com
Fabrication
Scott Rocca, scottarocca@gmail.com
