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MARK MARTIN: When the COVID
crisis hit, back in March
was the severe shortage of
personal protective equipment.
And so one of the
things we wanted to do,
as a lot of other
people, was trying
to figure out how we can help.
I got together with
Rick here at the FabLab
and one of the things we came
up with was face shields.
Was a relatively
simple thing to make,
but we just didn't have the
supplies in the United States.
RICK ROTHBART: Me and a
couple other technicians
and a couple of students
got together remotely
to design and come up with
a plan to produce these face
shields completely in-house.
We could prototype
them here at the FabLab
and make them and give
them to doctors and nurses
and other health care
providers in the area
in desperate need of them.
So we made a batch of 500 in
about a week, donated them
all to Highland Hospital.
Since then, we shifted gears
and designed a face shield
that could be
injection molded, which
is the process of melting
plastic and injecting it
into a mold.
And it is how pretty much
all the plastic parts you own
are made.
To get there, we had to use
our 3D printers and our design
software to come up
with a model that would
work for injection molding.
We went through about
seven iterations.
I had to come in here late
at night to run 3D prints
and then come in in the morning
and change the prints out
to tweak it.
And now, because they're
produced locally up
in Santa Rosa with our
injection molding partner,
we can make pretty much as many
as we want extremely fast, much
faster than waiting
for a turnaround
from an overseas manufacturer.
MARK MARTIN: Once
the mold's made,
it's easy to start producing
10,000 or 15,000 of these
a week, where with
3D printers you
might be able to make
a few dozen a week.
RICK ROTHBART: The Laney
FabLab is the campus makerspace
and innovation hub.
Students from all the
different departments
can get their hands
dirty learning
how to make things using digital
fabrication tools, software
access to design and make pretty
much almost anything they want.
We're open to all students,
all staff and faculty
here as well, completely
free of charge.
MARK MARTIN: One
of the ways we were
able to create this
product quickly
was because of the FabLab.
Even though this is
being done now outside,
without the tools here in
the FabLab and the people,
we wouldn't have been
able to rapidly prototype.
It really was both the
community we had around FabLab,
but also the space itself
that made this possible.
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