Simple Inexpensive Protective Face Shield

thingiverse

Edit: March 30 - New design - One piece of strapping (46 holes long), one rivet, one rubber band and one overhead. See photos - Build instructions to follow. A few days ago a friend mentioned that a local hospital was looking for a quick supply of inexpensive face shields and asked me what I thought about a 3D printed version making its rounds on the internet. I really liked the idea but couldn't print this design on my 3D printer as it was bigger than my printer could handle. He also mentioned that each print takes over an hour to complete, so supplying 5000 face shields in short order would be difficult to do. Since not everyone has a 3D printer handy, I thought that I would try to redesign this shield and see if I could make it out of readily available, inexpensive, locally sourced materials: perforated pallet strapping, overhead transparency film rivets and tape. Disclaimer: I am not a designer of medical equipment. I do not know what the requirements for face shields are. I am simply modifying an existing design for build simplicity. There are standards for personal protective equipment (PPE). In Canada, PPE such as this is covered in CSA Z94.3-2015, and in the US it’s ANSI 287.1-2015. I do not have a copy of either of these and hence have not read them. But the adage goes: desperate times call for desperate measures so I thought that I’d give it go to develop an inexpensive face shield that could be easily made from locally sourced, readily available materials. I finished my first prototype yesterday (March 27th) evening and am surprised by how easy it was. It took me about ten minutes to make this first prototype. And the total material cost was about $3.00 per shield! I spent some time discussing the design with my friend and we simplified it even more and further reduced the material cost to less than $2.00 per shield. My costing calculations are based on retail pricing of commercially available materials. With wholesale pricing, the material costs could be further reduced (possibly to less than $1.00 per shield). I am posting detailed build instructions with the hope that this design may be useful for others to build and implement while we battle this COVID-19 crisis.