3DCrowd UK Emergency 3D Printed Face Shields
Update: 10th May 2020. Six weeks after this community grew from nothing, we've 3D Printed and dispatched 130,000 face shields. Sadly, we are still needed by front line workers to provide essential PPE across the UK. So we have raised our funding target from £160,000 to £250,000 to better reflect the money we need to meet the urgent demand that is still out there from the NHS and care homes. We need your support and donations more than ever until the traditional PPE supply chain catches up with demand, something we had hoped would have happened by now. The COVID-19 crisis is not over, but there's now hopefully some light at the end of the tunnel. This is not the time to take anything for granted, or to take our foot off the gas. We need your support and donations to ensure that we can continue to do our bit to support the people who are looking after those who need it most. Thank You!
Update: 1st May 2020. Much has changed since we started our Go Fund Me page. We have grown to a 8,000+ strong community of makers, delivery drivers, operations and support volunteers from all walks of life. We've raised over £130,000 via our Go Fund Me page and dispatched over 92,000 face shields across the UK.
One thing that has sadly not changed is the lack of face shields for front line workers, especially at the local level. Many of our maker's machines have been running none stop for over 4 weeks now to meet demand and your donations help make this possible.
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There is a critical shortage of medical PPE at the moment and even as the pandemic worsens supplies are dwindling. Medical institutions around the country have reached out to the 3d printing community for help and support in overcoming the shortages caused by overwhelmed production infrastructure designed around high volume/low cost but often struggles to scale to changing demand and many factories have been out right closed down by the situation in China.
As a result a more desperate approach is needed- the production of functional shields to protect medical workers that can be produced by anyone with the raw materials and a 3d printer, and thanks to Joseph Prusa we have just such a design. we have makers from across the country currently donating their print time and their materials to produce these shields, we have hospitals across the country asking for supplies but we only have so much material on hand and can only afford so much to donate to produce these. and so this is where this campaign comes in! we are looking for support to allow us to cover the cost of materials and transport of these masks where ever they are needed, each kilo of filament can, on average, print around 20 face shield frames, each kilo of petg filament costs on average around £20 per spool even now we have orders for 70, 100, 800- shields to be delivered asap, we need filament, we need elastic and plastic sheets for the visors and with your help we can afford this! we can keep our NHS staff healthy, they should never have to work without vital PPE (Personal Protective Equipment.)
