Although Santa Cruz, California is in a shelter-in-place like most of the world, Santa Cruz Bicycles’ R&D team is at work producing face shields (PPE) for local medical staff using sheets of plastic cut using their CNC machinery typically used for cutting carbon fiber as well as 3D printers used for prototyping.

The equipment is able to make up to 20 face shield lenses every 9 minutes, yielding ~1000 shields per day. 

Ten days were spent evaluating designs, developing multiple prototypes and getting feedback from local healthcare professionals to ensure the end product suited their needs.  3D printers are used to make reusable and sterilizable support frames using open source CAD designs. Enough material has been procured to produce 8,000 face shields in two different designs in the next week. 75 face shields from the pilot run were delivered to the Santa Cruz County Donation Center today. The team isn’t working in isolation, this is a community effort, working with volunteers, medical professionals and other local companies to coordinate efforts into effective and rapid action to address the anticipated needs.  

With a little help from everyone, we’ll get through this together and come out as an even tighter community on the other side.   

If you'd like to help donate to the cause you can find the Santa Cruz Community local COVID-19 response fund info here -  https://www.cfscc.org/funds/covid-19-local-response-fund