Like every other makerspace in the US, I spent the spring of 2020 making face masks, face shields, intubation boxes and ventilator splitters. It was an odd time that revealed first hand the fagility of the supply chain as our local schools rallied hundreds of teachers to bring us their unused transparency sheets so we could use them for face shields. Elastic became as rare as gold, shipping times quadrupled, even PVC pipe was hard to come by. But with COVID quickly spreading, we did everything we could, including driving to Richmond in order to source the materials we needed to keep up with PPE production as essential workers from the local hospital continually asked for our help.

This was an effort supported by many at Vector Space. There were three things I was responsible for making: face shields, intubation boxes, and a ventilator splitter prototype.

Our efforts were featured during Virtually Maker Faire, and the design files for our folding intubation box can be found on Github. Details about the rest of our COVID response can be found here.