Remember last week when we told you that there was a new press at MMS and we would give you photos and videos this week?

First, we have to tell you why having this press is so great.

Visors

A donor – Kapco Metal Stamping, cut a bunch of visors for us for the face shields we are making and donating. A BUNCH. You know this is kind of a pain in the neck for a company – they have to set up their machines and they have to send their people to work on the project and it’s not something that makes money for them. It’s just a really nice, generous, wonderful thing for them to do. But we cannot ask them to do it forever.

We had to find a longer-term solution.

Die

We needed our own die. Apple Die made it for us. It’s pretty! It’s so simple and elegant.

Here’s some detail – this is where it punches the holes where the visor attaches to the frame.

But you can’t just use your hands to mash a piece of plastic on top of a die to make a visor unless you want a lot of blood on the visor, which you do not because then you can’t see out of the visor, which defeats the whole purpose.

Temporary press

So Markus rigged up a small press thingy. But, as you can probably tell, it’s kind of a pain in the neck to operate.

New press

So Markus bought a real press.

He bought a press at auction.

And paid only ELEVEN DOLLARS FOR IT because – well, this is Wisconsin and here, we do not waste.

And now we have power – more power – to stamp out visors and there will not be blood. We can stamp our own visors and make more face shields and donate more face shields and help save more lives and who can argue with that mission?

The mystery

You may stop reading here if you want. You have the basics of the story. We needed a way to make visors at the shop and now we have it.

But there is more to this story. And it’s a bit of a mystery.

How did this press end up in Milwaukee?

It started in England over 50 years ago.

We know this because Markus is an awesome detective. He found documents stuck inside the cabinet.

The British United Shoe Machinery Company Limited

Who is The British United Shoe Machinery Company Limited (BUSM)?

Who is Samco?

Did Samco sell a machine to BUSM?

Here’s what wikipedia, citing what appear to be reliable sources, says about BUSM:

British United Shoe Machinery (BUSM) Ltd. was the head office in Leicester, England of a company which for most of the 20th century was the world’s largest manufacturer of footwear machinery and materials, exporting shoe machinery to more than 50 countries.^[1] In the 1960s and 1970s, it was Leicester’s biggest employer employing more than 4,500 locally and 9500 worldwide.^[1] Most of the workforce was recruited via an apprentice scheme which trained a large proportion of Leicester’s engineers.^[1][2] The company had “a respected reputation for technical innovation and excellence”,^[1] between 1898 and 1960, it developed and marketed nearly 800 new and improved shoe machines and patented more than 9,000 inventions, at one time employing 5% of the UK’s patent agents.^[3]

The collapse of the company in October 2000 destroyed the pensions of the workers. Their story became “one of the most vivid examples of what can go wrong with..Private Equity”^[4] and brought “shame on Apax.”^[5] The company subsequently went into administrative receivership and was the subject of a management buyout. This new company itself went into administration in September 2006. In November 2006 a new independent company, Advent Technologies Ltd, was formed by former workers of BUSM providing technical support, advice and spare parts for the range of BUSM machinery.

I can’t find a website for Samco-Strong, but there are other websites that refer to the company and describe them:

Samco Strong Ltd is supplier of Cutting Presses and other types of machinery to all the Leather Industries, they also operate a fast and reliable Press Knife service.Located in UK.

Samco press cutting systems are cutting time and costs across a wide variety of industries including: gaskets, automotive trim, plastics, foam, rubber, packaging, woodworking and furniture, garment manufacture and textile cutting, carpets and floor covering.

They have the following cutting press: Swing Beam cutting machine, Beam Press,Traveling Head press etc.

“Indeed, virtually every fabric or material die cut process can be – and generally is being – carried out on Samco presses.”

So maybe Samco sold a press to BUSM.

James Brighouse, Ltd

Who is James Brighouse, Ltd? The only thing I can find online about them is a story in the May 8 1964 London Gazette about factories exempt from the “Employment of Women and Young Persons” section of the Factories Act 1961.

Did the press go to Scotland first? To a manufacturer of bobbins and discs? And trawl nets?

That seems to fall along the lines of “Bait, beer, and prom dresses,” but perhaps there are manufacturing overlaps I am not seeing.

Or maybe that envelope on top held parts that the original press owners ordered?

More Samco – the mystery continues

And then there’s this label. It appears to be a shipping label from Samco in Leicester, which is also where BUSM was headquartered, to Boston. Which must be Boston USA, not Boston House, Abbey Park Road, Leicester, which is very confusing.

I don’t know this because I am psychic but because we also have this clue:

We have a packing slip from 1966 with the destination of “Boston,” not “Boston House.” And we know that somehow, this machine ended up in the US. (Deduction.)

We know we got it at auction. And that it appears to have been owned by a plastics company before. But what were they making? And where were  they? In Boston? Or has the machine had other owners since it was shipped to Massachusetts in 1966?

Unless Markus finds more papers stuck somewhere, we are left here: a machine that was built in England before 1966. And it still works.

The workers at the Gerald L. Ignace Indian Health Center, Inc. were happy to get their shields as they start COVID-19 testing in Milwaukee.

Donations

Our big news for the week is that we broke $20,000 in donations with our GoFundMe campaign. Yesterday we reached, with a matching donation of $1,000 from GoFundMe, $21,422. This means we are OK for money for now.

Deliveries

The other big news is that we have donated over 5,000 shields. Two weeks ago, we delivered 2,199 shields. Last week, we delivered 1,612. This week, we delivered 805. We are not sure if this is because the need is diminishing because COVID-19 is going away or because health care workers are finally finding suppliers or if it is because the people who need to know about us don’t know about us.

It may be a combination of the two. Yesterday afternoon, we got a request for 200 shields from a woman whose mother is at a local nursing home. Nine of the residents have been diagnosed with COVID-19. The home did not have any face shields at all.

And another person wrote, “My granddaughter requested 25 masks for herself and her coworkers.  She says that the number of patients has eased up but that she is preparing for the expected second wave.”

We do have substantial inventory of both raw materials and finished shields that Markus can store for us.

Clicker press

We mentioned last week that Markus has been working on a clicker press so we can make our own visors.

Markus is testing the new die from Apple Die.

We found a press at auction and paid – are you ready – $11 for it. (We are Wisconsinites. We are frugal.)

As soon as it’s at the shop, we will get photos and video, we promise.

In the news

And finally, we have gotten some really nice press (of the fourth estate type) lately.

When nurses and doctors needed face shields, a couple of young Marquette engineers started creating them Marquette University

With the COVID-19 pandemic and “Safer at Home” order, members of the Milwaukee Makerspace pivoted from using their facility as a space for innovation and learning to one that can create thousands of face shields per week. Urban Milwaukee

The nonprofit Milwaukee Makerspace recently launched a project to get critical personal protection equipment (PPE) to medical professionals, hospitals and clinics at no cost. OnMilwaukee

Volunteer engineers teamed up to make face shields My Frontline Hero

Your work is more appreciated than you will ever know! Helping us to keep our families safe while caring for our patients is the greatest gift you could ever give. Thank you!

Once again if you are in need of face shields, please request them!

Last week we reported delivering 2,199 face shields to Milwaukee area hospitals and clinics. That number was high due to a backlog the week before, so we were doing a lot of catching up last week, and we started this week all caught up (and a little ahead) so this week’s delivery number of 1,612 doesn’t seem as impressive, but in total since we started producing face shields, we’ve delivered 4,396.

For the clear front part of the face shield we’re still working with a few companies to cut those for us, but Markus has been working on a clicker press so we can also make them on our own. He has the die mostly ready to go thanks to Apple Die. With the giant roll of PET plastic we got this week we should be able to put quite a dent in the 30,300 injection molded frames we have. Yes, that’s 30,300 injection molded frames. We… have… a… lot.

Because we have a lot, and can (fairly easily) produce more, we’ve had some requests from outside Wisconsin for some. We’re deciding how to deal with those, but know that our primary mission has been to keep medical professional in the Milwaukee area safe when they are at work caring for our family, friends, and co-workers.

Once again if you are in need of
face shields, please request them!

Also, major thanks are due to Netzer Plastics in Medford. We could not have reached these numbers without them. Their injection molding capabilities (and awesome robot) have helped us help keep people safe. (Their web site is still “under construction” because they’ve been busy making frames for us, but if you need some injection molding done, talk to them.)

We’ll keep going with production… Our GoFundMe campaign just crossed $19,000 so we’re doing okay for covering expenses, and at least a one or two requests were not fulfilled due to some organizations being supplied PPE from other sources. We don’t know if we’re out of the woods yet, or if things will get worse, but we will help while we are able to. Keep checking back for more updates!

Want to help?
https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/ppe-for-milwaukee

It’s been quite a week! It was just seven days ago when we said We are almost ready to make a lot of face shields! because Compumold was able to get our injection mold done in less than a week and do it at a reduced cost for our efforts. Thanks again to the crew at Compumold!

Once the mold was done it went to Netzer Plastics in Medford where they were able to start injection molding immediately. Within a day we had 1,700 injection molded face shield frames.

But that was just a start! Netzer Plastics injection molded all week, we kept sending people to pick up gaylords full of frames, and we’ve now got 17,000 injection molded 3DVerkstan face shield frames at Milwaukee Makerspace. (Erik who designed it even took notice.)

17,000 is a large number. That’s a lot of frames! But wait… we’ve got more numbers…

Our GoFundMe campaign PPE for Milwaukee is at $18,797 as of this post. Which is good, because we spent a lot of money on the injection mold, and a lot of money on plastic. Milwaukee Makerspace is an all-volunteer non-profit organization, so no funds to go pay anyone, everything is going towards materials, and any needed tooling. I don’t have a number for volunteer hours, but it’s easily into the hundreds…

There’s one more number… 2,199. That’s the number of face shields we’ve delivered this week. We’ve worked through about half of the requests that have come in through the request form, and looking at the requests we still need to fulfill, a lot of them are for 100 and 200. Hopefully we’ll surpass our 2,199 delivery number by next week’s total.

Finally, beyond all these numbers, and talk about plastic, and other things… the reason we are doing all this is for the people. Medical workers in need of protection. Here are a few of the recipients of our efforts.

Want to help?
https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/ppe-for-milwaukee

Ten thousand. Ten thousand frames in three days.

TEN THOUSAND FRAMES MOLDED IN THREE DAYS.

Holy smoke, you guys. 

We are going to be able to help so many people. 

This is all moving so fast. 

On Wednesday, the mold was ready. The people at Compumold in Phillips worked late every day and over Easter/Passover weekend to finish the mold in less than half the time it usually takes to make one. They understood that our mission is to save lives and they wanted to be part of it.

On Wednesday, Jeff Netzer at Netzer Plastics in Medford drove to Phillips to get the mold and made some samples.

On Thursday, Markus Schneider drove to Medford to look at the samples. 

They were good.

Jeff started cranking out the frames. At the rate of 2,750 a day.

On Friday, Markus drove to Medford again and picked up a box of frames.

Jeff kept cranking them out.

On Sunday, Jon drove to Medford to pick up half a Gaylord of frames. (That’s all that could fit into his van.)

And today – Monday – there are more frames waiting.

Jeff says he will keep making frames as long as he has the plastic.

And we will keep helping medical workers with shields as long as we can.

Our mold is ready!

The mold for injection molding of the frames for the face shields is ready.

Why does this matter, you ask?

Because with injection molding, we are going to be able put a lot more shields onto the faces of our medical workers in the Milwaukee area as they fight coronavirus. We are going to be able to save more lives.

We have been cutting the frames one by one on Tom Gondek’s CNC router, which is not a bad way to do things, but it’s slow. And each one of these frames has to be washed two times, once in water, once in alcohol. By hand. Which is also slow.

As of April 15, we have requests for almost 4,000 face shields in the queue.

We can produce about 200-500 frames per day with the CNC router.

But with our new process – with injection molding – we will be able to quadruple production, making up to 2,000 frames per day.

And the frames made by injection molding do not need to be cleaned even once, so the overall process will be a lot faster.

I spent yesterday afternoon with Alden and Chris cleaning frames. It’s a tedious, slow process.

You dip the frames, two at a time, into a bath of alcohol water. (Which, BTW, makes your hands really cold.)

You let them sit on one side for five seconds, then you turn them and let them sit on the other side for five seconds.

Then you lift them out, let them drain, carry them to a drying rack (of which we have limited capacity), and hang them. They have to be completely dry for packaging.

This is not the best way to ship a lot of shields. Not when you have a backlog of 4,000.

Jeff, our injection molder, has already picked up the mold in Phillips and taken it back to his machines in Medford. He will have samples for us today.

Stay tuned!

We’ve got a progress report on our MMS Face Shield project. We started cutting frames for face shield about a week ago in an effort to fill the gap in the supply of PPE going to hospitals and health care clinics in the Milwaukee area. Our total as of Friday was about 2,000 frames for face shields cut on the CNC routers we have access to at ABC Woodworking.

We’re cutting more each day, and plan to add an additional two spindles to the gantry of the primary CNC router so it can cut three at one time. Meanwhile our friends at KAPCO Metal Stamping are able to stamp out 20,000 of the clear front shield parts to go with the frames.

Our GoFundMe campaign has raised over $12,000 so far, and we should be doing injection molding of the frames in less than two weeks. That will do two things: dramatically speed up the process of creating face shields, and reduce the cost of material per shield. (We are estimating close to 1/10 the cost of plastic used in the injection molded version.) With the ability to increase volume, we hope to expand beyond front line medical workers if their needs are met, and examine providing face shields to essential workers as well and investigate reaching outside the Milwaukee area. (We’ve already gotten requests from friends in other states as well.)

Now, if the face shield market gets completely saturated and we don’t need as many (which is a good thing!) we’ll be looking at what else we can do. Speaking of diversifying, we’ve also got a group of members who are sewing masks. Dan and Hapto put together 130 mask kits to distribute to members (in a non-contact fashion) and over 80 masks have been produced so far. There’s a lot of great sewn mask making efforts in our area, but it’s great to see our members jumping in as well.

One last update: Much of what we are doing started in the Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies group, and while we haven’t been as active as we’ve wanted to (due to making face shields) there is now a local effort, the Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies – Milwaukee group which a few of our members are involved in. Hopefully they’ll be able to steer us towards the best practices and efforts of the larger group. (And if you can help, please join in!)

We’ll do our best to keep you up to date with progress on this project as we move forward. As we’ve said among the group, we can’t wait to put ourselves out of the face shield making business, but as long as there’s a need to keep people safe that isn’t being fulfilled, we’ll keep doing it.

Want to help?
https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/ppe-for-milwaukee

We’ve delivered face shields! Medical professionals are now using these in the field, and we’re happy to see this photo they sent us.

We’re working on ways to speed up production, still exploring new partners to help out, and doing our best to keep our spirits high… and this helps a lot.

Want to help?
https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/ppe-for-milwaukee

We’re still learning and refining things, but we’ve had a number of people ask about the files… so here are the files!

https://github.com/raster/MMS-Face-Shield

They are on GitHub, you can download them, you can fork them, you can share them with others. Since we started with the 3DVerkstan design we are also using a Creative Commons BY-SA license. Please respect that, we want to grow the world of Open Source Medical Supplies.

If you have improvements or suggestions or feedback, we’d love to hear it. Email covid19help [at] milwaukeemakerspace.org

We’ve already had people suggest some improvements, or ask why we are doing things a specific way, so we’re hoping we can all develop better practices through dialog. Also, expect the GitHub repo to change/improve as we learn more. (There’s a cleaning guide for the shields coming soon!)

Any changes to the files should maintain the peg spacing so that shields fit properly into the pegs (at least on our end) as we’re getting thousands of those stamped out right now, and it’s sort of a standard at this point…

Again, share these, try these, use these… Let’s keep fighting COVID-19 and doing all we can to help medical professionals keep themselves (and us) safe!

Want to help?
https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/ppe-for-milwaukee

When the push to make face shields started we saw a lot of makerspaces and individuals fire up the 3D printers as tons of designs started showing up online. If you’ve got a 3D printer, by all means, help out by making things… they aren’t the fastest method, but they are nice in that it’s “hit print and walk away” to some degree. And filament? There are a lot of rolls of filament available. (Got access to 10 or 20 or 50 machines in a print farm? Get them running!)

We then saw other people start using laser cutters, which tend to be a lot faster than 3D printers, and PETG was the material of choice, until it ran out. We know a guy who used all the PETG he could source locally, then drove 16 hours to buy more, and at this point there are people who just cannot buy PETG to feed into their laser cutters. (If you can find PETG, keep going, fire those lasers!)

So we opted to use 1/4″ sheets of HDPE (high-density polyethylene) as our visor material. It machines really well and on a large CNC they go pretty fast. You might be familiar with HDPE if you own a plastic cutting board. It’s great because it can be easily cleaned and disinfected, unlike things that are 3D printed.

We’ve got two CNC machines running at a shop one of our members runs. (Milwaukee Makerspace is not open, we are not using the CNC machines there.) We are running with very few people, working a safe distance from each other. The process involves two replaceable spoilboards so you can prep one by screwing down the material, loading it onto the CNC and running it while you spend time unscrewing the cut material from the other one.

The other part of the face shield is the front part, the shield that is in front of your face. Clear semi-rigid vinyl was available so we got that. It cannot be laser cut (well, sort of) so we looked into getting a steel rule die made so we could cut them easily and quickly. In our quest to get a die made we talked to KAPCO Metal Stamping and they offered to just stamp them out for us. Amazing! We don’t have a clicker press and while some friends offered use of their equipment for automated loading and cutting, KAPCO can do a huge volume quickly and safely.

As long as the supply of HDPE and clear vinyl holds out, we’ll keep going with this process. If we can’t source those materials we’ll move on to something else. It’s probably a good idea to start making a list of other materials that could work, or alternative processes for making.