Destiny.

Welcome back to smarter.

Every day I'm alone so I can take this off.

I am in a warehouse that was once used to work on the Saturn five rocket, and we have just spent the whole day tooling up a line to disinfect and sanitize three D printed materials.

Those air three D printed materials that come in from the community way disinfect them all through the process.

We drive them off right here, and then we get him packaged up, ready to ship out the doctors and nurses.

So I would like to make a video to show you how he did this.

Because it's one thing to make it three d printed.

They shield.

It's quite another to do all the logistics effort behind it in order to get it out to the community so we can fight covert 19 together as a community.

But it involves a lot of people cooperating.

So I would like to show you how we got all this set up.

So here's where we're at right now.

Covad, 19 is bad.

There's not a miracle drug in place that will just heal a person once they get it, and our doctors and nurses are out there day in and day out fighting this thing, and some of them are becoming exposed because they're right there with it, and so they need protective equipment.

But the problem is, our supply chains were so stressed because this hit everywhere, all at once globally, that if you're living a place like North Alabama like I do, you are painfully aware of the fact that most of the protective equipment is being shipped to more densely populated areas.

So a couple weeks ago, I'm looking around and I'm seeing all this play out and I'm thinking to myself, Man, no one's coming.

It's on us, Isn't it like this is really on us.

I visualize the whole problem like this.

The medical community is basically the front line of defense in our fight against the Corona virus, so you can think of them as standing in between it and us.

These health care workers need to be protected from the virus, so they were various protective gear that drastically reduces the likelihood of them getting sick themselves.

Right now, we don't have enough of this protective gear.

These professionals and trained technicians are not people we can just replace.

If they go down, you and I can't just step up when one of them gets sick and you're not gonna get help from an outside community because the other communities Aaron a fight of their own against the Corona virus.

But what we can do is help make them protective gear so they can stay in the fight.

But it's not just enough to make them here.

It has to be done in a coordinated way so that the gear could actually get to the front lines where it's needed.

Most makers are naturally independent thinkers, but at this moment it doesn't do a lot of good if we're not making with the hospitals need or if we make this protection for them.

But don't create an efficient distribution chain to get it to the front lines to them.

If you're making anything right now, you don't need to be off just making your own thing.

It's important that you get with the program.

It's super important that all the makers in a community work together as a team to execute an agreed upon plan so that doctors, nurses and everyone getting their hands dirty right now has what they need to keep fighting for us.

Let me be clear.

This video is not about making face shields for your community.

This is about getting your hometown to rally together, to do whatever the medical infrastructure in your specific location needs together as a team, even though we're kind of isolated in our own communities.

The collected we is fully operational when it comes to protective equipment.

This is Joe Krusa.

He's the guy behind the Prus, a three d printer company in the Czech Republic.

They make great printer's.

Last month, his team designed a three D printable facial, which could easily be fabricated.

Using those old transparency is that your math teacher used to use on the overhead projector.

This has been a huge success and has been all over the Internet, and he probably heard about people three d printing different types of protective equipment, whether be respirators or even valves for ventilators.

Here's the deal, though.

Just because you have a three D printer doesn't mean you can just print something out and run up to the hospital and try to save the world, because these people are actively Fighting Cove in 19 right now, just like the visual ization earlier.

If everyone prints what they think is right, it's gonna lead to confusion and frustration.

A more efficient way to do this is to get everybody in the maker community to interact with the medical community through one touch point.

In our case, we did it through the supply chain.

What I recommend doing is finding a leader in your area that's already communicated with a hospital and found out exactly what the hospital wants.

It might be a respirator.

It might be a vow over, like a test kit.

In our case, it was a face shield.

So this is how we got that word out and communicate it to the whole community.

Counts fill.

It is time to do what Huntsville do, where a bunch of engineers were a bunch of geeks.

For a bunch of scientists, it's time to help the medical community.

We circulated in our area subreddit among famous local bloggers, and basically we made this call to action to anyone in our region who had a three D printer, and we asked them to print a very specific S T l file.

People that signed up just filled out a Google form.

We had their email addresses, so we had 350 people, three D printing instantly, and we had the ability to communicate with them.

So I talked to a lot of people doing this in their cities.

And they all say the same thing.

Once they establish this communication, that where there's two types of people, the vast majority of people just do it.

They're like that.

The file I'm in, Let's do it right now.

But there's this other kind of person that like Well, actually, we could be more efficient if we, like, ran it in this way.

And, you know, we could do it with this hole puncher.

Whatever.

Don't be that guy.

Just don't whatever the file is, print the file.

That's all you got to do, man.

And here's the deal about this.

You're right.

It is probably more efficient.

It is probably better, and it's quicker run time, whatever it is.

Yes, got it.

The doctors requested this, so we should all just do it.

So whatever your idea is, unless it's a matter of safety, just do get with the program and do what everybody else is doing.

So here's another thing you're gonna want to do while your whole team is printing.

You're gonna want a couple of pockets of research within your group, thinking about two weeks out.

For example, Three D printing is great, but it takes about three hours for every part.

Injection molding, however, kicks out apart every 25 seconds.

Which is why when a guy named Chris who owns an injection molding shop, replied to our call for help in the Google form, we stroke the check for materials, and he worked through the night to design a mold so that his toolmaker, Jeremy, could start machining the mold the next day.

One injection mold machine could do the job of hundreds of printers like 1000 parts per shift, the challenges that it takes several days to make the mold.

So use three D printing as a stop gap to get you to the injection mold solution, and then you can pivot with your three D printers to another design that the hospital's need.

So we kind of shot first, and we ask questions later.

We knew the doctors wanted face shields.

So we had 350 people printing those.

But we still don't know how to collect these things.

And we also didn't know how to disinfect them.

We have to assume that every single face shield that the community delivers potentially has Cove in 19 on it.

So this is when we reached out and we discovered that there was a guy in Sacramento named Pooch.

I got his phone number from Joel telling the three d printing nerd.

But Pooch was an open book.

He's created this whole thing called Operation Shields up, and he's about two weeks further along in the process.

Then we are all just basically started the beginning from our intake, actually, between shifts right now, which is good, you're gonna need a shipping and receiving.

So this is like in take.

This person here is cataloguing Who sent us.

What?

This is the disinfection line.

This is all of our stuff right now.

I think I just got a palette.

This is all waiting to be disinfected.

We're starting here with a detergent rinse.

Then it goes through a water 20 minutes in here.

Get a couple kitchen timers.

There's no doubling in the concentration to speed up the process.

It's it's You have to let it swell time that really matters on that, uh, one more rinse after.

After the 20 minutes is up, get yourself a bunch of rack kind of book shop and 100 blowing at us after a drives off over their packaging and stuff.

So you're gonna want some quality bags.

Probably That seems to be the best thing because they've been through sanitation.

They get bagged up right away and sealed.

And then the bag goes inside the box.

You know, basic checklists.

Basic assembly guide.

But we're standing up again Hub.

And this can all be open source for anybody to use as a model for, you know, rapid response, manufacturing or whatever You wanna call this.

You're a week ahead and an order of magnitude more organized than we are.

You know, before you before you jumped on it said, like every 24 hours is like another other evolution.

Really?

Right now, pooch is my sin.

Say these names.

Alan Alan is amazing.

He's telling us what he did, how he learned the lesson, and he's hoping that we can improve on it.

so we can pass that along.

This guy right here in the zoom call with Pooch took what Pooch said about disinfecting the parts, and he connected this with a local ministry who got it all set up per CDC guidelines and just made it all happen.

Pooch also recommended something that was very interesting to me, he said.

It's important to team up with a local medical society, and the reason you want to do that is like, for example, the same thing that was happening with the large metropolitan areas taking all the stuff right.

You don't want to have your stuff goto one area when you might have these smaller practices out in the county in a rural area, for example.

They need the stuff, too, because they're on the front lines.

That's what the medical society conduce for you.

They act as a referee to make sure that whatever you're producing as a group gets distributed fairly, we decided to do a drive thru drop off point for the entire communities, three D printed parts, which is kind of tough to do and also maintain social distancing.

We use baskets so people could drop their stuff off everyone who made parts pre soak them in a bleach solution prior to dropping them off to begin the disinfection process.

In two hours, we collected 3800 parts, which was incredible.

And you might think you have, like, an idea of what a person that owns a three D printer looks like.

This is the most diverse group of people I have possibly ever seen.

It's like a character from every genre of movie showed up and deposited their stash larger, small, and they were all united in the exact same calls.

We wanted to protect the medical community.

There's this legitimate thing that happens to me if I see people from all different walks.

Unlike differing opinions and stuff.

If they all come together and they work for a common cause, that's good.

I get emotional.

I just do don't know what the deal is, but I do.

This was one of those moments for me.

I was so proud to be a human, and I was so proud to be from my community.

Okay, back to the task at hand.

So because this stuff is going out into doctors, offices and hospitals, we have to make sure that there's nothing on it.

There's no chance that the virus is here It all.

So we had to go all the way through the complete disinfection process.

A group of nurses and dental hygienist came to save the day.

They understand sterile fields.

I texted pooch, and he did it down and dirty audio recording and sent it to me so I could play it for the nurses and hygienists so they could figure out how Operations shields up.

Did all this in Sacramento.

We then walked into the room, and over the course of a few hours they developed an entire system to disinfect the three D printed parts.

This part was awesome.

The engineers just got out of the way and we built whatever these ladies told us to.

By the end of the day, we were delivering parts the hospitals for the first time.

So we used today to optimize everything.

A volunteer named Ellie came in and used her graphic design skills to make instruction sheets for us.

We have disclaimer sheets that we put inside all the pouches, et cetera.

We have a system to build parts.

We have a system to sanitize parts while maintaining social distancing.

Rebecca wrote a procedure for everything in the room so we can have any volunteer jump in at any time and do any job.

Well, so this point, we need volunteers to actually work this process.

We also need all the doctor's offices around the area to know that this is an option for them.

Now they can get these shields we need to coordinate.

Which is why I called Matt.

He's been an awesome volunteer at every event I've ever been to in town.

And he knows absolutely everyone so mad.

Just showed me how to make a battle plan.

This is how you do it.

You did this in Katrina, didn't you?

Did this for Hurricane Katrina?

Yeah.