By Deborah McDermott
Seacoastonline.com
Michelle Goodwin, an ideas coach with the iPX innovation department at Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, works on an assembly line for personal protective equipment that shipyard workers are constructing and sending to health care workers amid the COVID-19 pandemic. [Steven Porter/Seacoastonline]
KITTERY, Maine — A small group of shipyard workers have been using the yard’s 15-20 3D printers to create face shields for hospital personnel in virtually all regional hospitals, and at facilities as far away as Manchester and Portland and as close to home as the town of Kittery.
That’s in addition to a recent emergency request for 1,500 shields from the USNS Comfort, the Navy hospital ship currently docked in New York City.
And it’s not only the yard’s 3D printers that are in use. University of New Hampshire faculty and staff have joined in the effort, using campus printers to manufacture the headband portion of the shield, supplying about 2,000 so far.
Altogether, about 5,000 face shields have been produced, at a clip of about 375 a day, and production is not expected to scale back until private industry retools and is able to pick up the slack.
This whole effort began just three weeks ago, when machine shop engineering technician Alex Kartaszewicz was perusing posts on a Facebook group of manufacturers, engineers, doctors, nurses, government employees and others dedicated to open source, or nonproprietary, ideas to help with the coronavirus pandemic.
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