Editor's note: This story is part of Southwest Michigan Second Wave's On the Ground Kalamazoo series and our ongoing COVID-19 coverage. If you have a story of how the community is responding to the pandemic please let us know here.

It sounds like something from a science-fiction movie. You run out of something? Turn on a printing machine and make more.

But using technology that involves a few more twists and turns, Western Michigan University is doing just that. It is using its 3D printers to make face shields that protect local hospital and health care workers as they treat patients suffering from the coronavirus (COVID-19).

“With eight printers running simultaneously all day, we expect to make upward of at least 70 shields per day,” says Dylan Ledbetter, assistant director of Information Technology Labs and Help Desk at WMU.

He says he expects that number to rise to 100 per day as things move along.

His office is using a 3D model created by 3DVerkstan, a 3D printing collective based in Sweden, to make face shields that the university plans to donate to local hospitals. Faculty and staff at the WMU College of Engineering and Applied Sciences are working on a very similar face shield design. And staff and professors from multiple campus departments are involved in producing the personal protective equipment.

Multiple departments at Western Michigan University and join forces to produce face shields that will allow medical professional professionals some more safely treat patients with the coronavirus.
The 3D printers at WMU help students produce three-dimensional renderings of everything from game board pieces to solar car models. Ledbetter says there are several in the university’s Informational Technology Labs, and others at its College of Aviation and its College of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Informational Technology Labs runs a free 3D printing service that students use. Among them, mechanical engineering students use the printers to complete a required senior design project.

“Right now we’ve been focusing on a model that prints a single headband,” Ledbetter says.

Using plastic filament, the printers produce three-quarter-inch-thick strips of plastic that look similar to a pair of glasses without lenses. Those are used as the headbands for the face shields. A sheet of transparent plastic, like that used for slides in an overhead projector, is later attached to each as the protective shield.

Volunteers at the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences are helping to cut the shields to the proper size. Shop specialist Allin Kahrl and faculty specialist Mike Konkel, are doing the 3D printing, material preparation, and assembly at the engineering college. Each shield takes about 45 minutes to produce.

The effort has been helped by a donation of shield material (a 1,000-foot roll of thermoplastic polymer resin) from Fabri-Kal Corp. of Kalamazoo. According to information provided by the university, that is enough to produce about 1,500 face shields, but more material is expected to be donated.

Asked what had inspired the project, Ledbetter says WMU is one of several universities using existing technology and know-how to help battle the COVID-19 outbreak.

“We had a couple of people from the university forward articles they had seen,” he says. 

He says, “Basically, we just started seeing reports all across the board of maker spaces using their resources to help with the PPE shortage.”

He says that because the WMU campuses have been closed to all but essential personnel since mid-March, in keeping with an executive order by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the project has been using volunteers from some of that personnel to transport materials and finished face shields.

Completed face shields are being taken to WMU’s Sindecuse Health Center. Professionals there have contact with local hospitals and health care providers who have a need for more personal protection equipment. And the masks are distributed accordingly through the health center.

In a prepared statement, Thomas Wolf, WMU's chief information officer, says that the first shields were presented to the folks at Sindecuse Health Center and they loved them.

The team planned to give a shield to officials at Bronson Methodist Hospital for their evaluation and it has reached out to WMU Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine. Ascension Borgess Hospital has indicated it has already found a shield supplier, according to WMU.