Early June at Something Labs

The weekly project roundup! We’re continuing to make moves in many directions!

Impermeable Gowns

GownTown (our gown production center), has opened! On the first day we produced 500! We’re running it for the next two weeks, looking to help Boston Scientific scale up and garment manufacturers get the tooling to make it so. We plan to produce 10,000 in the next 2 weeks.

PAPR Shields

We have two more weeks of production for our PAPR shields and will produce another 8,000 for local production, and then looking to move to Advantage Engineering to fulfill future needs. Thanks to our grant from @getusppe we are managing distribution nationally! We have sent our first ones across the country!

3D Printing

We’ve been lining up new 3D printing facilities left and right; working with FormLabs to print at $1 / CAPR tab, and working with Diversified Plastics to print 100 vent parts for Kaiser Oakland. Google Labs is also going to print a couple thousand CAPR tabs this week to get us started!

Intubation Boxes

The boxes are out in the wild! After assessing demand, we’re shifting polycarbonate in stock over to sneeze guards for small businesses opening up. 

Sneeze Guards

Sneeze guards are now a requirement for opening and we have been creating quick models for businesses to create their own sneeze guards. This week we reaching out to black-owned restaurants and communities of color to donate our initial run of sneeze guards.

Face Shields

We’re looking at another short production run of face shields for a few more requests and to keep people safe at protests. We anticipate making another 2,000.

PAPRs, Window Masks, + others

Our traveling CAPR squad has been fixing CAPR + PAPR helmets left and right, and our genius designers have been working on a new custom PAPR. We are also iterating on a windowed mask for people who use lip-reading.  

Webinars with Maker Faire and Nation of Makers

Eda and Sam represented our team at Maker Faire, and will do again at NOMCON (Nation of Makers) on Friday, June 5. The upcoming talk will be about working with local manufacturers, a process we’ve begun in recent weeks and look forward to expanding!

The Future

We are beginning to discuss the future of Something Labs, both near and far. Our first instincts are to make a hard production run over the next two weeks, and then focus on partnering with manufacturers to help scale new prototypes. We never thought we would exist forever. We will never be the most efficient producers of PPE at scale, nor should we. We were formed to close the gaps and provide PPE quickly to frontline workers, before major manufacturers could mobilize to do so. We also want to celebrate all of the amazing achievements of the community, keep us connected and going, and show gratitude and love.