Will Wong, owner of Chasewood Learning, an after school STEM program, was watching the news on TV and learned of the shortage of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers.
Wong reached out to his robotics community, to see if they’d be willing to help with the need of PPE.
“I emailed out to our group and basically I heard back from about eight to ten that said ‘yeah we’d be interested in helping out with some 3D printing’ because I know a lot of teams have their own 3D printers,” said Wong.
Wong was also able to get four 3D printers from the Aurora Public Library, but still needed more. That’s when the Naperville Public Library came in to lend a helping hand.
“We were going to loan the 3D printer out, but then I talk to my staff and we decided that my staff can start doing the 3D prints at home,” said Jonathan Charles, the digital services supervisor at the Naperville Public Library. “So I sent a 3D printer with all my staff members grinding away getting these prints done.”
Over 200 Face Sheilds
The group is printing out the visor part of the face shields. So far they have been able to print out over 200 of them and the only reason why they haven’t printed more is because the process is long.
“[With] 3D printing time is the biggest consumption,” said Charles. “It takes an hour and a half to print for one of the more simpler ones like [the] one Will showed you. I just printed one and it’s about three hours.”
Once completed, the visor part is then handed off to Kathy Prince, a parent of Chasewood Learning robotics team. She assembles the visors with the plastic shields with the help of her son Cole. Together they’ve help print over 200 3D face shields for staff at Edward Hospital in Naperville.
“I think for me it’s just something to do really, said Cole. “But also knowing that they’re using them is really awesome.”
Keep The Prints Coming
The group doesn’t plan on slowing down production anytime soon.
“As long as they’re people out there who need them I’ll keep printing,” said Charles. “Hopefully companies that make these devices can get caught up where we aren’t needed.”
If you’d like to help out the effort, you can check out Chasewood Learning’s website for more information.
For Naperville News 17, I’m Christian Canizal.
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