How to Engage the 3D Printing Community for Production

In this doc, you'll learn:

• How to decide if engaging external, "non-insider" 3D Printer users and other makers is right.
• How to solicit, receive, and process inbound 3D printed parts
• How to maximize that input
• How to stop once you're done

Here we will only cover appeals for 3D printed solid plastic parts. We will not discuss appeals for textile products such as masks.

Is this right for you?

There are many, many owners of 3D printers who are likely going to be excited about helping you in your time of need. Many people are looking for an opportunity to volunteer but do not necessarily wish to get deeply involved in a community or have great demands placed upon their already-stretched time. In this time of quarantine, when folks are trying to get by as best they can in often very challenging circumstances, not everyone can be expected to mobilize for the long term. Providing an opportunity for those people to kick off a print for a few hours, let it run, and then mail the completed print in sometime later is a low-hassle way to get them involved. With that said, you have to understand what you're getting into and be ready to deal with it.

Manufacturing parts yourself, or purchasing mass-produced parts or complete PPE articles has some advantages, some of which are:

• Predictable delivery
• Consistent quality, or at least quality that's in your control
• Control over production rate
• Control over materials used
• Control over designs used and ability to switch between them at will

Producing those parts yourself has come clear disadvantages, to wit:

• Cost for materials
• Need for personnel and person-hours to manufacture and assemble items
• Need for specialized equipment such as laser cutters, 3D Printers, modified holepunches
• Specialized domain knowledge of
  • Supply chains and materials acquisition
  • Design and fabrication
• Time to spin up your operation

Calling upon a cadre of makers beyond your immediate sphere can potentially permit you to trade all the advantages above to mitigate the disadvantages below. Put succinctly:

If you are:

• In the relatively early stages of manufacturing PPE for your region
• Are in the upswing of PPE demand for your area and need to get product out the door as fast as possible
• Don't have a settled design on hand for your own mass-manufacturing process, or are waiting for delivery of mass-manufactured goods
• Are short on funds
• Are short on staff

Then appealing to the broad community of makers might be a viable option.

What You'll Need

• A well-tested, low-defect-rate design that can be easily printed
• A place to receive packages via any courier means (USPS, FedEx, UPS, DHL)
• A plan to unpack and distribute the parts you receive
• A media strategy to alert the community that you are in need of their assistance, and stop the supply when you no longer need it

Choosing a Design

All properties of shield designs are beyond the scope of this page. See Shield Types and Their Pros & Cons for a full discussion.

Remember you drawing upon the resources and expertise of the 3D Printing community at large, many of whom will be unfamiliar with PPE requirements, and whose supplies may be limited. Desirable properties of a design for their use are

• Well-tested; you don't want to become a 3D-printing troubleshooting operation for everyone who is trying to make your design
• Low material cost per unit; You're probably asking members of the public to bear these material costs so choose a design that isn't a filament-hog
• Fast print time per unit; The quicker people can get these to you the better. But, keep verk quality control in mind!
• Multiple units per print (vertical or horizontal stacking); People don't want to print one at a time--choose a design that can print several in a single print run, suitable for set-and-forget printing.
• Low defect rate per print; Your design shouldn't require lots of tweaking and careful calibration and should be generally-suitable for a low-cost printer without special training.
• Compatibility with many material types and printer models; Don't choose a design that requires exotic materials. Most people will have PLA, ABS, or maybe PETG on hand--make it work with any of those.
• Lightweight for shipping; You're probably going to ask people to bear these costs too - make sure the parts don't have to be very delicately packed or weigh more than necessary.
• Consistency with the design that you yourself are manufacturing; The fewer designs you are making at once the easier this will be on everyone. It will make your assembly and distribution operation much easier if everything is the same.

We found that the 3D Verkstan was our best choice given these criteria. If you are spinning up a self-manufacturing operation in parallel with a community manufacturing operation you should use the same design, and these criteria should inform your choice.

Receiving

A hard requirement is a single, unchanging address that can receive everything anyone sends you via any commercial carrier, be it USPS, FedEx, DHL, or UPS.

If this goes well, you'll receive lots of boxes. Really - a lot. If you are working out of an industrial space with a shipping/receiving department then this is simple -- you already have everything you need. If you're working distributed-style across peoples' homes, hackerspaces, and other ad-hoc locations, things get trickier.

A home address is a possibility if the resident is OK with publishing their address on the Internet, and they have sufficient storage space on hand to receive everything. If you have a suburban home with a garage you could probably get away with this.

Apartments are probably not a great choice. If you have on-site personnel who usually receive packages for you then it might be a viable option but you must prepare them for what's about to happen: potentially dozens of packages a day or more for several weeks. Make sure they have a place to stash them and make sure you are ready to relieve them of the boxes and have a place to put the empty ones six days a week. Be ready to tip your apartment staff if you do this - you are about to subject them to quite a lot of extra work.

Commercial mailbox companies such as The UPS Store and Kinko's/FedEx are a viable choice as well but can be quite expensive; when you set up a box the staff will probably ask how many packages you expect to receive and will bill you accordingly. Make sure you have the funds on hand to cover the costs.

A PO Box is the best choice that splits the difference between all the above. The Post Office will accept packages from any carrier, subject to having a "Street Address" form on file (see here for the form)[https://www.usps.com/pobox/customer-agreement-for-premium-po-box-service-enhancements.pdf]. You can rent a PO Box online, but you must go in-person to the PO Box to show the two forms of ID required (one photo and one non-photo: this is confusing; you must have both), and pick up the keys. If you go this route, once you have your PO Box keys in hand you must visit the box regularly. You can sign up for Informed Delivery to--in theory--find out when packages arrive. However, we found this to be very hit or miss and totally useless for packages from non-USPS carriers. You will become very friendly with the staff at your local Post Office and they may greet you with some bemusement when you arrive to pick up your many packages, assuming your appeal goes well. Be ready with a vehicle, hand truck, or a phalanx of willing colleagues to help carry your packages from the Post Office. Finally - be nice to the Post Office staff. They're already working during a pandemic and now you've increased their work volume by a considerable amount. A final note: not one single package will ever fit in a PO Box of any size, so just get the smallest one and save a few bucks. Once you've publicized your address you can't change it anyway.

Unpacking, Repacking, and Distribution

Inbound boxes are mostly filled with fresh air and packing material and work great for protecting 3D-printed parts during shipping, but once they get to you, it's terribly inefficient to keep them in boxes. You'll need to open them, keep rough track of what you have, and get ready for the next stage in distribution. The first time you bring home (or have delivered directly to your luxurious receiving department) a haul of packages, it will be very very exciting. The tenth time it will be much less exciting. Here's how you can keep your sanity.

First things first: mask, shield, and glove it up. This is the stuff that came from random people during a pandemic so take precautions to prevent infection. If you have an N95 this is the time to use it. You're no good to anyone if you get infected yourself.

• People will ship you all kinds of things. Sometimes it's designs you didn't ask for. Sometimes it's a nearly-failed print. On initial inspection, there's no need to be very meticulous, but if something is obviously no good, toss it now. Be ruthless - if you send a doctor a flimsy or broken shield then you're eroding trust in your organization and potentially costing them time. If it's broken, toss it. For examples of QC decisions, see our verk quality control page.
• There's no need to be too precise about counting all the parts that are coming in. Speed is much more important here if you're working at high volume. You can be precise and make counts of things on the way out when you are sorting things into prepackaged, counted units. Right now, just get the stuff out of boxes. You will quite quickly be able to estimate the size of a pile of Verkstan frames down to the nearest fifty or hundred. That's good enough to tell a courier.
• Industrial garbage bags are a pretty good way to keep things together if you need to move things around in coarse batches.
• A sharp boxcutter is a must. Now is not the time to try to use your keys to open packages.

If your receiving place is the same place you are going to be distributing from, things are easier: you can decide how you want to go from mailing containers to distribution packs. If it isn't, you have to figure out how to bulk-transport hundreds-to-thousands of parts from one spot to the other. 0-200 frames can be done in a backpack or on foot. 200-500 frames can be carried on a motorcycle. Anything above has to be carried in a car or SUV. Have a plan for where these parts are going to go and how to get them there! There's a strange panic that can hit you when you've just unpacked 3000 Verkstan frames, have nowhere to send them, and you know that another 3000 will arrive in the next day or two. Make sure that you're not just filling up somebody's living room with bits of plastic without a place for them to go--you need demand before you can turn on this supply.

Media and Appeal

Building up a social media following is a must for this whole project - not just engaging the 3D Printing community. Put the word out via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Include what you want, where to get the design, and where to send it.

Reach out to the tech press that 3D Printing-type folks usually read: Make Magazine, Hackaday, Instructables, and the like.

It is enormously helpful to have a partner who can promote your need to their customer base. Matterhackers was enormously generous in rallying their community. Other similar companies may also be willing to amplify your need to their customers.

It is crucial that you have a way to turn off this supply when it does not need it, or to redirect it to other designs or locations. There will come a time that you no longer need a deluge of packages arriving every day; perhaps your area no longer needs so many shields, or you've spun up your injection molding operation, or you've brought enough 3D Printing capacity under your own control. In any case, you need a way to turn off the supply when the time comes. If you have a partner organization, have them tell the same people to stop. If you've been soliciting supplies via social media, reach out there. Finally, you may have some very prolific donors who just keep printing and sending. You will probably need to reach out to those people directly, with thanks, to tell them that their donations are no longer required.