BY BETH DEDMAN
Jack Keum, a Brooklyn-based 3D printer and business owner of iMakr, and his team are printing more than 1,000 face shields to be personally delivered to hospitals in New York.
When Keum and his colleague Andrew Chiang learned that hospitals were in need of face shields, his staff opened up the 3D printers on their shelves and started printing the bands which would hold the shields to the healthcare workers’s faces.
“We were sourcing all of the components ourselves, but companies like Fabberz and RBW, jumped on board and offered to help,” Keum said. “That really helped us produce more and get more of this done quickly and delivered to hospitals.”
Fabberz and RBW, or Rich Brilliant Willing, focused their production team to laser cut the transparent shields that fit into the bands produced by iMakr, Keum said. Fabberz was already a laser cutting company, but RBW is a LED lighting manufacturer who shifted their whole production to do laser cutting.
When the transparent shields are cut, they are sent to iMakr, where they complete the assembly process. iMakr has 50 3D printers producing the bands, which take two hours to print. He hopes to soon have 100 printers running.
They have already donated 200 face shields to St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx, according to their gofundme page. When they have the next shipment completed this week, they will send the face shields to NYU Langone in Brooklyn, Columbia Hospital Center and New York Presbyterian Hospital.
Keum hopes to keep producing even more face shields beyond this next week, but needs additional resources to pay employees to work on the shields, as well as pay for the transparent shields from Fabberz and RBW.
“It’s really nice to see, in a time like this, that everyone wants to help in any way that is possible,” Keum said. “Initially we thought we would just do this ourselves, but when people found out we were doing this, they offered to help out. It is really nice to see everyone come together and make things like this happen.”
Information on donating to iMakr is available on gofundme.
