‘It’s something to help out’: California companies answer call for protective medical gear
The numbers are overwhelming, the need seemingly insurmountable, but businesses joining the rush to produce protective medical gear are in many cases donating space and volunteering the hours, sweat and brainpower to help California hospitals make a stand against the new coronavirus.
Their not-so-secret weapons come in the form of 3D printers and computerized tooling that they have redirected to producing hard-to-find items such as the plastic shields protecting nurses and doctors and the tiny valves hospitals need to fit the ventilators crucial to keeping COVID-19 patients alive.
“There are a lot of heroes out there in the health care sector that needed help, and so we were looking at how we could help them,” Noah Kelly, a design technology manager based at the Sacramento office of healthcare architecture firm HMC Architects. “Ultimately, the idea was: How can we help and do our part during this pandemic?”
This effort has swept in businesses of all sizes, from Fortune 500 corporations to tiny Main Street firms: Giant HP Inc. has 3D printing teams churning out shields and respirator parts. Folsom’s Dream Arcades, a boutique video game manufacturer, and Sacramento’s nine-employee Time Printing recognized they had stock of hard-to-get plastic that could make face shields and found ways to make that happen.
And, HMC, which was ranked No. 27 among last year’s Top 300 architectural firms by Architectural Record, searched the Internet and struck gold with Columbia University’s open-source instructions on how to make face shields with 3D printers. Its six printers, scattered across the firm’s work-from-home locations in California and Arizona, have produced 880 of the protective masks, and they’re still working.
Mike and Michelle Ware, owners of Dream Arcades, said hospitals in the Sacramento area will receive the face shields and masks they’re making on two production lines they’ve added to a warehouse floor that was once solely dedicated to making table top and stand-up video arcade consoles.
The small company answered a community call-out several weeks ago by Mercy Hospital of Folsom, producing face shields with sheets of the thermoplastic material PETG shaped by a three-dimensional printer and then cut with a computer-numerical-control router.
“It’s the same material used for water bottles,” Mike Ware explained. “That’s why it works well for face shields.”
Desperate demand for protective equipment in a pandemic has made it difficult to get supplies of the plastic sheeting. Once $42 a sheet, the price has exploded to more than $280 a sheet, Mike Ware said. But the Wares and their workers have rolled out several hundred of the shields — about 14 a day — since the Mercy call went out several weeks ago, getting equipment to health workers while keeping their own workers on the job during suddenly tough times.
“We’ve had to furlough employees. We’re starting job sharing. We want to keep people working as long as we can,” Ware said. “It’s not a lot — hundreds, not thousands of shields. Masks? Maybe 50. But it’s something to help out. Other people are doing the same thing we are. Hopefully, we’ll build up to tens of thousands.”
Andrew Poole, the owner of Time Printing, said his business largely dried up after the stay-at-home order, and he had started printing out fliers and brochures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website and dropping them at local health care businesses free of charge.
They provide facts about COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the new coronavirus, Poole said, and offer up tips on how to prevent the spread, including instructions how people should wash their hands.
“You have to think about what we need now and how the world is going to look six months from now,” he said. “It’s going to be different. There will be more warnings. There will be a lot more procedures in place.”
He said one of the brokers he works with suggested he try to figure out how to make face shields and, like the team at HMC, his team went to the internet and found an open-source design, but this one was for the CNC routers he has at his print shop.
Poole said he was lucky enough to get in an order for enough plastic material to make 30,000 face shields, and one health care company already ordered a couple thousand from him.
“When the 2,000 order hit ... I called my vendor,” Poole said, “and he said ‘I have 1,700 sheets on my his floor.’ I said, ‘Ship it.’ He emailed me a few minutes later and said, ‘Thank God, Andy, somebody else almost took it.”
HMC has been running its six printers around the clock since 5 p.m. March 27, producing up to a dozen face shields each per day. It seems small, Kelly said this week, but inventory is beginning to grow.
The project is a side job for HMC’s homebound crew, but the firm has already produced nearly 880 of the shields — 99 in Sacramento — and the company is putting together a plan to distribute the PPE. The architecture firm is working together with their new health care clients to make sure the shields get into the hands of the health care workers who need them most.
For Kelly, the project is a personal one.
“My wife and I are expecting our first child in days and, so, we’re really intimately involved with our health care team. For us, we are really excited to help the health care team as they help us,” Kelly said. “They’re doing their best to protect us as we go through this process. If we can help them in any way, we’re really excited to do it.”
This story was originally published April 12, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
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