Ask HN: Soliciting Donations for Maker Nexus Making PPE's for Covid19
I hate doing solicitations, but this is a good enough cause that now I am.

I've gotten involved in a project I never thought I would. I'm personally volunteering with a non-profit that is making a critical health care item and giving them away to hospitals. I'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.

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, "we're making face shields from shower curtains and hot glue". I asked a doctor friend who works at a free clinic in SF if they are running out of face shields and he said, "are you kidding? We have never had any."

You probably don't know that the non-profit I volunteer for (Maker Nexus) is busy making them and giving them away! We've turned our whole makerspace into a face shield factory. It's a war and we are in the thick of it.

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'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.

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.

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't be staff to handle broken legs, heart attacks, car accident victims. This could affect us all.

And we'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.

And we'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.

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're getting a lot of $100, $200, and even an occasional $1,000 in donations. This is fantastic, but won't get us to 1,000 face shields a day.

$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.

FYI, I'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'd love a chance to tell them about us. Please send this email on to anyone at all.

I'm including some links below that will give you more info - one of them is a video we just did today for the hospitals.

Maker Nexus on KPIX:

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/video/4495791-maker-commun....

Our effort: http://makernexus.org/covid19

Details on the face shields: http://makernexuswiki.com/index.php?title=3D_printed_face_sh....

Our assembly video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKqDUExM4Q8