Healthcare workers need face shields. So we printed some.

Baseball fans love a story of the 30-something pitcher who finally gets called up to the majors for the first time after years in the minor leagues. We love the idea of improving, of contributing beyond what was expected.

This month at Outcome Health (https://www.outcomehealth.com/), we used a tool well beyond its reasonable expiration date, and it’s enabling us to contribute face-shield components to the Chicagoland medical community during this time when they’re most needed. This is the story of that tool and its shining moment.

Rewind to 2015. Outcome Health is in high-growth mode; we’re just starting to manufacture our own screens and tablets. A 3D printer is purchased to help with rapid prototyping of accessories, hardware items — simple shapes and nothing too complex. Over the next few years, we used our 3D Systems’ Cubepro Duo on several projects, but only for prototyping. That’s the nature of 3D printers — it’s usually not the best way to mass-produce anything. And this one was a budget model — low resolution, relatively slow.

As our product development needs at Outcome changed, our 3D printer fell into disuse. It gathered dust in one location or another, before finally relocating to our storage room. We’d see it now and then up there, and we’d often talk about resurrecting it for this project or that one. But the right project never came along… until this month.

While working from home amid the coronavirus outbreak, we learned of a group in Chicago using 3D printers to produce face shields for the medical community and we wanted to help. We were skeptical that our old, slow printer could produce useful components but we decided to give it a shot. A few of our team members traveled to our deserted office (safely adhering to social distancing guidelines of course) to rescue it and start a rehabilitation stint.

The A-team sent to recover and transplant the Cubepro Duo 3D Printer on 04/03/2020.

First order of business was to get it connected to some CAD software. But our printer’s manufacturer recently discontinued support and pulled all software from their website. I tried some open-source applications, but nothing would talk to our old printer. Thankfully nothing ever truly disappears from the Internet, and I found an archive of the software we needed and was back on track.

Then came the more common challenges of 3D printing — trouble feeding filament, difficulty removing prints from the print bed… But these issues were exacerbated by proprietary and unsupported software. Solutions to some of these involved giving the print plate an acetone bath, dialing infill density, and just generally a lot of trial and error.

But there’s a happy ending. The old printer is humming again, producing components for needed face shields, helping make the world just a little better. And I think that’s the best outcome for any tool.

The first delivery!

Interested in repurposing your 3D printer to support COVID relief? Hopefully our detailed Project Timeline can guide you!

• Friday 4/3: Recovered printer and filament from office. Transplanted the printer from the office storage floor to my dining room. On day one I ran into issues with open source slicing software (Ultimaker Cura) not recognizing the printer, thus not being able to communicate with it.
• Monday 4/6: We find the correct software file. 3D print file is generated and sent to the printer. Printing underway!

3D printing chamber and the start of a print!

• Tuesday 4/7: First print is completed, but the boat is difficult to remove from the printing bed. Print is destroyed in the process of removal.

While the printer was able to finish the print without error, removing it in one piece proved to be a different story.

Bed is given an acetone bath to help remove sticky residue and hopefully make for easier print removal. A shallow store bought steam pan aluminum foil lid was an easy option to act as the “tub.”

Visual of the foil pan and lid combination.

• Wednesday 4/8: Edits have been made to the print file, infill density increased. After warming up the printer with a few test prints managed to print some acceptable Budmen face shields!

Acceptable print removed without any damage.

• Thursday 4/9: Cleaning the print nozzle to hopefully make for more effective filament extrusion. Touched base with teams about printer functionality.
• Friday 4/10: Contacted bKL Architecture, a Chicago firm that has converted part of its office into a PPE printing farm, about current print throughput and activity. They provided a different open source face shield design that has a quicker print time, is less error prone, and uses less material.

Budmen faceshield on the left and newly acquired faceshield design. Less material means quicker prints!

• Monday 4/13: Print bed levelness issue needed to be adjusted. Troubleshoot day. Corrected warp and filament extrusion failures.

Uneven print bed levelness apparent to the right. Filament would not take to the bed and would often ‘squiggle up’ outside the extruder nozzle.

• Tuesday 4/14: Print bed acetone bath and cleaning. Clearing the print bed of old stuck on material.
• Wednesday 4/15: Printer has yielded 2 successful prints! First successful prints of the week!

The successful face shield prints

• Thursday 4/16: Printer has suffered no failures for today, a first! Majority time is spent on making usable prints rather than troubleshooting and scrapping material from this point forward!
• Friday 4/17: Contacted bKL about recent successes and a material drop off. First shield drop off is scheduled!
• Monday 4/20: Drop off has been made to Andrew at bKL. PPE worn during. Minor contribution of 7 face shields but contribution nonetheless!

Two guys showing off their mask protection at the drop-off.

• Monday 4/27: Another drop off has been made to Andrew at bKL. Added another 10 face shields to his numbers!

bKL has done tremendous work thus far helping the local healthcare world. Happy to contribute just a little bit with an otherwise old and dusty machine.