Hacker News Reader

Comment by leipert | Hacker News Reader

The Czech 3D Printer company Prusa has been on it for a while: https://www.prusa3d.com/covid19/ and they have been open-sourcing the design. You can print it on a 3D printer.

Based on that design (and others) makers in Germany have started organizing, so that people can either request shields or supply shields. Organized on Slack and into local distribution hubs. We hace started sharing supplies and even got discounts from filament vendors: https://www.makervsvirus.org/en/

Edit: Just wanted to share something related and not downplay Apple with this comment. Would love if they'd opensource their designs ;)

View on HN

What is the point of 3d printing something that clearly needs to be mass-produced in great quantities? Maybe it "feels good", but it's just too slow.

I'm honestly not sure why people don't just use plastic food wrap as a cheap improvised alternative for face shields. It's lightweight, readily available, disposable, fits over any attire and does not restrict visibility.

As someone working with my maker space to deliver 3,500 shields a week to our local health organizations, I can confirm we do all in fact feel good for being able to play our small part. Helping people feels amazing, I'd recommend it to anyone!

Because it turns out you actually can 3D print some of these in mass quantities. Some of the printers we are working with right now are producing on the order of 10s of thousands of parts per day. And now, there are tool shops in the US right now cutting injection molds to make those parts in the hundreds of thousands of parts per day.

The kind of 3d printing Prusa does (and provided plans for) is a tabletop/ amateur printer, not something which can scale.

They literally print their printers on their printers.

So no, they do mass-produce with them: https://youtu.be/BjoQw5fGk6Q

The 3D model absolutely can scale.

Sure.

But for an equal amount of effort, raws and manpower you could get much more out of traditional manufacturing, much quicker.

The product is a very simple stamp, with very simple dies with little wasted material. Perfect for traditional production methods.

It's great people with machines are contributing to the effort, and empowering/informing individuals to be able to do so as well. But it's just done simpler traditionally.

This is all great in theory, but in reality there are hundreds of thousands of these parts being delivered to hospitals right now, and they came from lots of people with lots of 3D printers at their houses, hackerspaces, and printer farms.

We can definitely talk about what would have been better and more efficient, but in the meantime people need this stuff today.

It's not a zero sum game.

It makes tons of sense for people with 3d printers to print as many as they can now because they can get them in the hands of people now. But once dedicated manufacturing comes online, that capability is going to be quickly become irrelevant.

The comment I replied to seemed to suggest individuals were printing 10s of thousands of these per day which is clearly not true. Thousands of individuals are printing a few each day which is vastly different.

> But once dedicated manufacturing comes online, that capability is going to be quickly become irrelevant.

You're right, but after this emergency all those production lines will be retooled to things that are more profitable.

The upside is that this pandemic has basically created a grass roots production network to fill gaps that will always exist in traditional manufacturing.

If the next world-wide issue can be at least partially mitigated by small plastic parts, that gap will again be filled by 3d printers, and we're all better off for it.

I don't understand your argument. Those 3D printers exist and can be used. Manufacturing and those printers are not exclusive options.

My "argument" was in response to the parent comment saying 3D Manufacturing can 'scale'. Which it certainly can, just not as simply or efficiently as traditional methods. Especially in this case with such a simple part.

I didn't intend to impinge on the people helping hospitals or people with faceshields now via 3D manufacturing hence the 'It's good...' part. Rather simply comment on scaling up manufacturing methods.

> But for an equal amount of effort, raws and manpower you could get much more out of traditional manufacturing, much quicker.

The set of people who have 3D Printers at home, and the set of people with access to large-scale injection-moulding facilities (along with tool production) likely have a very small overlap.

I imagine those that do have access to those facilities were already trying to make those tools (assuming they wern't already occupied with other more urgent tasks). It just takes longer for them to scale up, and there's fewer of them in a smaller number of locations.

These 3d printed ones are being delivered and used in hospitals in my area. Not sure in what quantity, but I'm sure they'd love traditional made ones too. If only it was being provided. So what you say isn't wrong in theory, but we're not dealing with an ideal situation in the first place.

Actually Prusa has a print farm with hundreds of printers or more normally used to print parts for their printers. But they possess significant manufacturing capability in their in house print farm, plus laser cutters for face shields and QA/shipping supplies. I don’t see why they wouldn’t use their substantial capacity to support COVID relief.

The point is: A lot of folks own a 3d printer and they are local. I can produce ~50 shields per day, that means I can supply shields to around 5 to 10 doctor's offices per day. My suburb in the city seems to have a few dozen doctors. Also if they can have a shield tomorrow, that is better than a shield in 2 weeks.

This can be a supplement until the original supply chains are up to speed and the doctor's can get the real equipment through official channels.

1. Having 100 visors is ideal, but I'll still take 1 visor over none.

2. It's really hard to breathe through food wrap and it doesn't cling to hair well.

>It's really hard to breathe through food wrap and it doesn't cling to hair well.

You wrap it around the top of your head (forehead level), so it sticks to itself. You keeps the bottom part loose, so it doesn't restrict breathing. It works.

I think there's a pre-assembled version of this, it's called "a plastic bag", and most people know not to stick their head in one. Please don't encourage dangerous behavior.

Covering your eyes with a clear film is dangerous? Do you regularly suffocate on your glasses or shades?

> You keeps the bottom part loose, so it doesn't restrict breathing.

Obviously you weren't advocating for a face mask that only covered the eyes.

I wasn't advocating for anything.

> You wrap it around the top of your head (forehead level), so it sticks to itself. You keeps the bottom part loose, so it doesn't restrict breathing. It works.

Sorry, does your version of HN not display the comments you've previously written? Or does your dictionary have different definitions for the words "it" and "works"?

I don't like arguing with strangers on the internet, so I think we should probably just end this conversation, but in the future I hope you'll be more considerate before advocating for harmful techniques. Hope you're staying safe and doing alright in these strange times.

> Maybe it "feels good", but it's just too slow.

The speed of product delivery is a combination of how quickly you can make it, but also how quickly you can deliver it.

3D printing loses on production speed, but wins on delivery because it can be made a few minutes' drive away from the hospital.

Ping matters as much as bandwidth.

3d printing is probably less effective than manufacturing at scale, but it has much lower setup time and overhead cost. Not to mention, this escalated demand for masks and face shields is going to be very short - 1 or 2 years at most. Setting up a whole factory to fulfill only a year or two of demand is not effective. By comparison, you can use your 3d printer for other stuff after the pandemic is over.

There are factories that specialize in small batches. Just some quick searching seemed to suggest that you could be getting O(1000) parts a day at a cost of a few thousand dollars (for the initial setup) plus a few dollars a part [1]. I'd imagine that the lead time is a few weeks rather than days, but if there's already a stable design wouldn't this be the best bet?

[1]: https://www.wired.com/2013/01/protomold/

Every little bit helps, and being able to desk-produce these means that you can make an impact directly and quickly. My parents are both still treating patients, and I was able to print 25+ masks for their practice.

While we're waiting for mass production to step up, these local productions make a difference now.

It just has a faster start. Here in Portugal people have been printing 3D face shield for 2 weeks (or more probably) and delivering them to those who need it.

In the meantime injection mold factories started creating the mold, fine tuning it and are now producing in large quantities.

But you see, for 2 weeks (or more) the big factories had 0 face shields coming out, which matters a lot.

People on the field don't need great and efficient solutions 2 weeks down the line, they need good enough solutions NOW.

I don't understand how the comment can have upvotes. "feels good"? Really? People with 3D printers are making a difference and actually helping those in the field. From health staff, to law enforcement to other areas. Shame on you.

And no I don't have a 3D printer. Unfortunately.

These kinds of parts can actually be mass produced. You could probably make 3500 face shields in less than a week with 10 printers. The mass produced Prusa i3 printers actually use quite a few 3D printed parts, and they made over a hundred thousand.

There's just no comparing 3d printing with the correct manufacturing equipment. This machine can probably produce hundreds of face shields per minute (wait until the end of the video for full speed):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuMSp-vxo7U

Sure, but setting up or changing an assembly line takes weeks, during which the 3D printer would have printed a few thousand masks.

Both technologies have their uses, and this is a demonstration of the usefulness of 3D printing.

Dustin from Smarter Every Day ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbEj7M3aZIg ) actually has a really solid answer to this.

The TLDR is: 3D printing can start instantly. Someone with CAD skills can have a design made, 3D printed and out for evaluation in hours. In takes days (or weeks) to get a good injection mold tooled and up and running. Then once the injection molding is going, 3d printing can switch to working on something else.

This is all about fast. fast. fast.

For smaller hospitals i‘d guess every single one piece of protective equipment counts.

There are a lot of 3d printers out in the world

For what it's worth, this design has been vetted by health care professionals and provides better coverage, as well as being faster and easier to print.

https://github.com/aon3d/covid-face-shield

Full disclosure: I work for Aon3d.

Can confirm - for example both the main maker space Fablab & local hackerspace Base 48 are making these face shields for medical personel here in Brno, the second largest city of Czech Republic.

I've also heard about regional schools using their 3D printers to make those.

You can see the shields, complete with the "Prusa" label on the 3D printed parts even in regular news coverage worn by medical personel.

3D-printing is great, but other forms or manufacturing are way faster. That’s how Apple is making 1.000.000 shields per day.

Sure, it you have the industrial tools needed for that. The Prusa shield needs a 3D printer (which many have or know someone that have it) a piece of laminating foil & hole punch (which you likely have if you have laminating foil). This way it can be made locally from local resources.

If you have a factory that can make a face shields by the milion, definitely go for it! Still, you need then to transfer the finished shields to all the many places that need them, which can somtimes be tricky with all the lockdowns and border checks in place.

This design seems pretty odd to me. You already have to have a machine that cuts thin sheet plastic to make the transparent shield part, right? The actual headband is then just another small piece of plastic sheet in Apple's (and others) designs. Seems to me that adding in a 3d printer can only slow things down, since it would be much faster to simply cut the headband with the same equipment that is cutting the shield.

I've been making these for a couple weeks now. The clear plastic part is generally sourced using the thick binder/presentation covers that come in 8.75x11.25 inch sheets, precut. The only requirement is a hole punch. Headbands can be any elastic material (I've been using button hole elastic for easy adjustment).

By headband I mean the part that you are 3d printing. Both designs still need an elastic strap.

I'm not actually sure what you're saying, then. Why is the 3d printed version odd if the transparent part is easily sourced without needing a die cutter?

The part that is being 3d printed in these designs is easily sourced without a 3d printer. Look at Apple's design. It uses a piece of the same transparent plastic in place of the 3d printed part.

In the Bay Area, Maker Nexus (a maker space in Sunnyvale) is coordinating production of these: http://makernexuswiki.com/index.php?title=3D_printed_face_sh...

I'd imagine the flexibility you get from 3d printing could have a double edge: on one hand anyone can fork the design, which gives enormous potential for iterative development; on the other hand forks lead to a lack of interchangeable parts.

Are people iterating on the design much?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com