Staff from Oakley Health Medical Centre express thanks for the face shield project
In April, a UKAEA engineer helped initiate a community effort, producing urgently needed face shields for the NHS.
Emil Jonasson, a Control Systems Software Engineer at RACE, is a member of rLAB – Reading’s Hackspace / Makerspace. After coming across an open-source design for a 3D printed headband, created by Josef Prusa, he decided to post a call for collaboration onto the Hackspace discussion group, to support the urgent need for PPE within the NHS.
Two other rLab members quickly responded to Emil’s post: Alex Gibson, who owns 3D printing company Edumaker, and Matthew Richards, a Product Engineering Manager at Cisco. With support from David Meads (Cisco’s Chief Executive UK & Ireland), over 30 3D printers were set up at the Cisco offices. A team of over 100 Cisco volunteers enabled the print farm to operate 24/7 over a three-shift rota.
As the team of collaborators were not specialised in manufacturing medical equipment, they worked with independent manufacturing consultants Dr João de Barros and Dr Richard Brydges to design, document and approve the manufacturing procedures and processes.
Emil was tasked to source the additional materials needed to create the components for the shields. These included plastic sheeting for the visors, elastic fastenings to adjust the headbands and ZipLock bags to package the finished products. Ethan Flynn (Mechanical Design Engineer at RACE) was also keen to support the project and used his contacts from the plastics industry to help Emil identify suppliers.
Emil said: “I feel we were very lucky, because we managed to get together just the right people with just the right contacts and expertise to make this happen really quickly.”
By the end of the project 8,000 face shields were shipped to NHS and social care organisations around Berkshire.
Emil said: “I am amazed by the hard work and dedication of the many people who gave up so much of their time to keep the production line going 24/7 – even throughout weekends and bank holidays. They have done an amazing job and provided so much help to our health services.
I also need to thank the staff at RACE for being extremely supportive throughout, tipping me off about potential suppliers and being very understanding towards me for the intense weeks when I was distracted by this.”