A friend from Open Works sent Le the file they were using to print part of the face shield, a design created by the 3D printer manufacturer Prusa. A 3D printer can make two sections of the design, the frame and the chin brace. The face shields are then assembled at Open Works: The frame has a band that fits to your head, and a sheet of plastic is put over it. The chin brace then holds the shape.<\/p>\n Le and his fellow printers are making the frames and chin braces, and Open Works uses a laser cutter to make the plastic face covering. While Goucher has a laser cutter, it was too big to bring home. The 3D printer \u201cruns in my guest room during the day while I work,\u201d Le said, \u201cand now that\u2019s all I\u2019m doing with it.\u201d<\/p>\n Goucher\u2019s 3D printer, which (along with the laser cutter) was donated by Margaret Warden \u201966<\/span><\/strong>, is a little larger than a toaster oven. With the original file, Le could make a frame every three hours. Prusa, as well as a community of online makers, is continually fine-tuning the design to make faster prints. A second design reduced the print time to two hours, but the frames had hexagonal holes that cause 3D printers to stop and start\u2014\u201cIt gets kind of herky-jerky,\u201d Le said.<\/p>\n Prusa then released a third version without the holes; the frames use more plastic but are faster to print. The 3D printer can make these frames in about 1.5 hours.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can make these very quickly,\u201d Le said. \u201cI\u2019m sort of stunned that we have to\u2014the need can\u2019t be so high that we need to make [PPE] that fast, but that\u2019s absolutely the case.\u201d<\/p>\n Even still, \u201cthere\u2019s something very cool about being a part of this,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve talked to my colleagues and students about what I\u2019ve learned through this process, and how agile this community is. There\u2019s an online discussion of thousands of people talking about how they can figure this out.\u201d<\/p>\n When Le has five frames printed (sanitizing the machine between each use), he dons gloves, puts the frames in a plastic bag, tags them, and drops them off outside of Open Works. The staff leaves them sealed for three days, the time it would take to be confident that the coronavirus had become inert. Once Open Works assembles the face shields, they send them to hospitals in the Baltimore metro area.<\/p>\n Le is still experimenting. When something goes wrong during printing, the frames come apart like spaghetti strands. Over the first weekend in April, Le tried to use a modified design that would let him print four frames at once, stacked like pancakes. \u201cIt was a disaster!\u201d he said. \u201cThe tower fell over pretty quickly into the second set.\u201d But the online 3D printing community is hard at work: \u201cThey are revising the model to make an even faster less error-prone version soon.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Goucher moved to remote learning, Associate Professor of Mathematics Phong Le \u201903 brought home the 3D printer to do some maintenance. Now, he\u2019s running it all day long, printing parts for face shields for health care workers. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":352,"featured_media":3408,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[12633,7935],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[87484],"class_list":["post-3392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature","category-goucher-today"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogs.goucher.edu\/magazine\/files\/2020\/04\/yellow-masks.jpg\")
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