
Ask HN: Soliciting Donations for Maker Nexus Making PPE's for Covid19 - rrauenza
I hate doing solicitations, but this is a good enough cause that now I am.<p>I&#x27;ve gotten involved in a project I never thought I would. I&#x27;m personally volunteering with a non-profit that is making a critical health care item and giving them away to hospitals.  I&#x27;m writing in the hope you would pass this on, hoping it finds some corporate philanthropist who would be interested in funding this excellent cause I volunteer for making face shields needed by health care workers. I thought you might have a network that reaches far.<p>You probably know that there is a critical shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers in this crisis. I know of one nurse who works at a major hospital in San Jose say, &quot;we&#x27;re making face shields from shower curtains and hot glue&quot;. I asked a doctor friend who works at a free clinic in SF if they are running out of face shields and he said, &quot;are you kidding? We have never had any.&quot;<p>You probably don&#x27;t know that the non-profit I volunteer for (Maker Nexus) is busy making them and giving them away! We&#x27;ve turned our whole makerspace into a face shield factory. It&#x27;s a war and we are in the thick of it.<p>Our place is 3D printing headbands and using our industrial laser cutter to make the shields. Add some elastic and a video on how to assemble these and off they go to places like Valley Medical Center. We&#x27;re sent 500 to them last Friday and 1000 to a local Kaiser hospital this week. We have way more requests to fill. Local hospitals need this stuff.<p>We can make about 85 a day in house, but a lot of people in the bay area have their own 3D printers and we have invited them to make the parts at home and drop them off at Maker Nexus for packaging with other parts and shipment. We have plans to be at 1,000 faceshields a day in the very near future. That could really make a difference in keeping health care workers safe so that they are there when we need them.<p>Imagine a time where the hospitals have only half their staff because of sickness! Not only will new corona virus patients have no one to take care of them, but there also won&#x27;t be staff to handle broken legs, heart attacks, car accident victims. This could affect us all.<p>And we&#x27;re working US wide. We had a contact in Pennsylvania that was making the 3D printed parts of the face shields but did not have a way to do the laser cut part. We shipped him 300 of the parts he needed.<p>And we&#x27;re helping the world. The original design of the face shield was made by a company called Prusa in The Czech Republic. We worked with local hospitals and evolved the design significantly to make it more effective. We have shared our work back with Prusa so they can update the plans they share with the world.<p>These face shields cost us about $5 each in materials. Not even counting our rent of $18,000 a month. And utilities. And maintenance on the equipment. And other stuff. For us to ramp up to 1,000 a day means we have to raise $5,000 a day. We&#x27;re getting a lot of $100, $200, and even an occasional $1,000 in donations. This is fantastic, but won&#x27;t get us to 1,000 face shields a day.<p>$5,000 a day is a huge amount of money for a small non-profit like Maker Nexus, but to give protection to 1,000 health care workers is a tremendous impact. And we can do that every day if we have the money. We are not going to have to do this forever, but right now we can make a huge difference. We need this money now if we are going to get these hospitals and clinics the protection they need. A single donation of $50,000 would let us make 10,000 face shields.<p>FYI, I&#x27;m sending this plea on to other friends as well. But if you know of some philanthropist that would be willing to make an impact, I&#x27;d love a chance to tell them about us. Please send this email on to anyone at all.<p>I&#x27;m including some links below that will give you more info - one of them is a video we just did today for the hospitals.<p>Maker Nexus on KPIX:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;4495791-maker-commun.." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;4495791-maker-commun...</a>.<p>Our effort: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;makernexus.org&#x2F;covid19" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;makernexus.org&#x2F;covid19</a><p>Details on the face shields: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;makernexuswiki.com&#x2F;index.php?title=3D_printed_face_sh.." rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;makernexuswiki.com&#x2F;index.php?title=3D_printed_face_sh...</a>.<p>Our assembly video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qKqDUExM4Q8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=qKqDUExM4Q8</a>
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rrauenza
This is a status update I recently received from the VP of Maker Nexus:

\------------

We have three programs running right now at Maker Nexus to help with the COVID
crisis. We put these programs in place after talking with the Valley Medical
Center Foundation. Through them we have been in touch with Kaiser hospital
nurses to review our designs and finished products. Kaiser is extremely
grateful for our help and has written us a letter to denote that we are a
critical medical supply facility during the crisis. We have also been in
contact with the Mayor of Sunnyvale and he supports our work.

Face shields: These are worn by hospital staff to help protect from splatter
(my term, not theirs). There are three parts to these. Two are made on 3D
printers and one is laser cut. We make the parts, assemble them, and drop them
off at VMCF for distribution. We have 6 3D printers of our own working 24
hours a day. We have borrowed 9 more from a closed middle school. We are
recruiting members of the community who have 3D printers at home to make the
parts and drop them off at our facility. We currently have over 200 at-home
volunteers on this project. We have 3 laser cutters to make the clear plastic
shield part.

We have the capacity to make 50 a day and we are ramping up. Our goal is to be
able to make 1,000 a day.

Today each shield costs about $5 and we are soliciting donations to buy the
materials to keep production running.

Face masks: Hospitals give these cloth masks to each person who walks into
their facility. These are not meant to protect the wearer, but to protect
everyone else by limiting the spread of the virus by these people. Kaiser has
asked to get all we can produce. We currently have people sewing these at home
and dropping them off at our facility for distribution. I'm not sure how many
a day we can make at this time.

Members have bought their own cloth and elastic for this project. Sources for
the elastic are drying up and we have made some bulk purchases to distribute
to our sewing team.

Scrubs: It's hard to believe, but the hospital says they are running out of
scrubs. We sourced some patterns and have members sewing these at home. Now.
This effort is just getting under way.

Other projects: Now that the hospitals know we are working, more projects keep
popping up. They asked us to reverse engineer a part for a machine they have
that is breaking. We are also in contact with a group that is trying to make
another medical device; they are sourcing funding for that themselves so that
we can manufacture the devices without having to raise money.

On top of all this, our dedicated members keep paying their monthly dues even
though we do not let them into the facility. I am really touched by their
continued generosity, energy, and ingenuity. However, our base monthly
expenses run in the range of $40,000 (rent alone is $18,000 a month) and I
worry that at some point we will run out of money; we do not have a large
general bank account. We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit. We have been serving our
community for a year; we opened in April 2019.

Donations to Maker Nexus will be used to keep our COVID response running.
Donations can be made through our website
[http://makernexus.org](http://makernexus.org) Large donors may want to
contact us directly to avoid the 3% fee that comes with using a credit card to
donate.

I would be happy to provide more information to anyone who wants it. They may
contact me at

jim.schrempp@makernexus.org

Best Regards,

Jim

\--

Jim Schrempp

Maker Nexus Board Member

[http://makernexus.org](http://makernexus.org)

