These are strange times. Covid-19 is taking the world by storm and a lot of us are temporarily unemployed and holed up at home. The Belgian maker community was very fast to respond to this new reality and immediately banded together in a Slack workspace, designing DIY filter masks, ventilators, apron patterns, etc.

Personally, I also wanted to carry my weight, but as the Slack was exploding with thousands of people and ideas, I got overwhelmed pretty fast and decided to just pick one project out of the bunch and concentrate my efforts on that. That project was the face shield.

We started by 3D printing the PRUSA face shield design that was just made available days prior; using empty lamination pouches as shield material. This worked fine-ish, but 3D printing is inherently slow and the laminates weren’t 100% transparent, so there was room for improvement. To make matters worse there has been a heavy debate around the porosity of 3D prints and decontamination issues resulting from it.

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On to plan B: fully lasercut masks. Some guys in the community had been quietly working on a simple design that could be fully cut on a laser cutter. Since I own the LAYZOR I quickly pivoted to this design in order to ramp up production. I got a bunch of PET-G sheets of 600x1000mm and got to work.

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One of the features of the LAYZOR that never got much use is the feed-through hole. At the time, I incorporated this into the design without specific purpose. I just figured it was nice to have just in case. Now, finally, this crisis provided me with the perfect opportunity to take full advantage of the feed-through feature. The 600mm wide sheets were easily pushed through and cut with minimal material loss.

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In the picture above, you can see how well the design is optimized for the sheet size I’m using. Six complete sets can be lasered from a single sheet with virtually no waste. Funnily, one of the waste pieces looks like a Batman logo ;-).

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And there you have it. I’m currently making 24 of these face shields per day. I’ve handed out about 250 pieces in total to healthcare workers ranging from veterinarians and dentists to home nurses and even the COVID-19 wing of a hospital…