Members of Milwaukee Makerspace, led by artist Kathy Cannistra, were bummed that they could not take their installation to Burning Man this year due to the event being canceled (like all other large-scale events this year) but they thought they could still put it on display while also helping draw some attention to Hales Corners’ restaurant Clifford’s Supper Club, which is owned by Kathy’s father.

A team of ten makers, friends, and family members helped build “Atomic Forest”. Between painting, sanding, soldering wires and custom-fabricating the metal components, the team estimates they spent 2,600 hours on the project. The sculptures debuted at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, Wisconsin in fall of 2019. After the exhibit closed, the giant flowers went into storage, and with Burning Man canceled, had nowhere to go, so Kathy thought that sharing the art with the community by putting them up at Clifford’s Supper Club would be a great way to provide an outdoor seating area allowing patrons to eat outside or simply enjoy the artwork.

The “stalk” of each flower rises from the center of a large table that also covers the underlying support structure. The “petals” are LED lights encased by white tubing looped back on itself. Each flower can run different colors and patterns, and grow dimmer as the evening winds down. Barriers separate the “garden” from the parking lot.

Within days of the flowers going up, the Hales Corners Village Trustees held an emergency vote by phone to have the installation removed. With so many restaurants struggling to survive, Kathy hoped that her art could offer a solution and some solace to the neighborhood and those looking to eat outdoors, but it looks like the city is not on-board with a temporary art exhibit meant to help a local restaurant that has served the community for over 60 years.

If you’re as upset about the Village Trustees decision as we are, please express your support for keeping the temporary installation up for the summer. Visit Support LED Artwork at Cliffords on Facebook and leave a comment.

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

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.

Here are some photos of the process happening at the shop one of our members runs. (We have very minimal people volunteering at the same time and they are keeping a distance from each other and being safe.)

We want to keep going! We’ve got volunteers, we’ve got machines, what we need is more material to keep them busy. If you want to help, we are accepting monetary donations through GoFundMe to help acquire the raw materials we need.

https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/ppe-for-milwaukee

We need HDPE for the visor and clear vinyl for the shields. We’ve got enough to get started, but may run out as early as next week depending on how fast things go.

All face shields are being donated to local area hospitals we are working with, and Milwaukee Makerspace is a 501(c)3 non-profit all-volunteer run organization. We just want to help. Help us help others if you can. Thanks!

We’re all living with the effects of COVID-19 and while we’ve temporarily closed Milwaukee Makerspace, we could not sit idly by while our community was in need.

There is an extreme shortage of PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) for medical professionals. The people who keep us healthy and safe are currently unable to keep themselves safe. To combat this problem, the global maker community is creating and sharing PPE solutions around the world.

We have joined that effort. A few of our members have developed a face shield based on an existing popular design (the 3DVerskstan) but with modifications to the visor piece to make it easy to create on a CNC machine instead of 3D printing or laser cutting. We enter production this week and hope to make at least 1,000 face shields by Monday, April 6, 2020. (And then more to follow.)

We had planned to use a drag knife to cut out the clear face shield part, but then decided stamping them out with a die would be faster. As we talked to local companies, a few offered not only to create the die but also to stamp out thousands of face shields. This amazing donation is going to be a huge help.

So what’s next? Well, Milwaukee Makerspace is a 501(c)3 organization, all volunteer run, and we’ve got a few people who are doing a lot of work. Members are donating their expertise, machines, and materials, and some of them are donating their own money to this cause.

As an organization, we’ve also pledged a portion of our budget to this project, even though we’ve closed the space and suspended dues from members. We may be applying for grants to help us provide these PPE donations to local hospitals and clinics (and yes, we’ve already got a list of recipients we are working with.)

We have also set up a GoFundMe page to ask for donations from the Milwaukee community for the raw materials. Please share this page with your friends.

We are all volunteers trying to help our community. (At least three of our members were infected with COVID-19. Two of them had to be hospitalized.) This virus is affecting everyone, so we’ve all got to pitch in and help.

We hope our contribution will allow the medical staff of our hospitals to be safe.

Expect more updates soon… We’re all working as fast as we can, but we do want to share our progress on this as time allows.

Pictured above is our first prototype, which was a two-piece design to allow for tightly nesting the pieces for cutting. In discussion with one of the hospitals they did not want any metal hardware attaching two pieces so we’re switching to a one piece design.

When people ask about visiting Milwaukee Makerspace we say “Come on down! Any Tuesday night at 7pm!” but sometimes we add “unless it’s a holiday” and with December here we’ve got two holidays falling on Tuesdays, so Tuesday, December 24th, 2019 and Tuesday, December 31st, 2019 we will not have our regular open nights.

So don’t come. Don’t come for the meeting, don’t come for the tour, don’t come to sign up as a new member. Everyone who helps run Milwaukee Makerspace is a volunteer, and they’re getting a break for two weeks. (Please, thank them for all the extra work they do!)

If you are already a member, feel free to come in! Your key gets you 24/7 access to the space, and you can work on your projects as usual, hang out with other members, or just take a break from the holiday madness. Cool? Yeah.