They come together online, share their designs via chat and set into motion thousands of 3D printers around the world.

Self-styled “makers” may once have been dismissed as basement hobbyists, but they could soon be praised as logistical saviours as they band together online to design and produce life-saving medical equipment amid a worldwide shortage.

In the last week, makers have formed groups on social media where they design and share electronic blueprints for everything from ventilator valves to UV sterilization devices. One Facebook group is working to connect hospitals from Mexico to Malawi with locals who can print up personal protective equipment (PPE) in their area.

In Canada, two groups – one in B.C. and one in Ontario – hope to be in full mass production mode soon, making tens or hundreds of thousands of pieces of PPE only days after many of them met for the first time.

In Kitchener, education technology company InkSmith has transformed itself into a manufacturing plant to mass-produce protective plastic face shields for nurses and doctors.

One week ago, the staff of InkSmith were wondering how the extended shutdown of schools was going to affect them when they decided to practise what they teach.

“All of the curriculum and training that we offer is a process called design thinking,” said InkSmith marketing manager Jessica Braun. “You find a problem, you define the problem, you iterate a solution, you build a prototype, and you test the prototype. So essentially, that’s what we did in real life and that’s how we got to where we are today.”

Inspired by a pair of makers in northern Italy who were able to 3D print hundreds of single-use valves for ventilators after a local hospital ran out, the company adapted a design for a face shield posted online by makers in the Czech Republic involving a laser cut clear plastic shield and a 3D printed headband.

But with only three 3D printers on site, they soon realized they couldn’t produce the shields fast enough for the massive and growing need. So they put a call out online and within hours were receiving hundreds of headbands printed out by folks from as far away as Barrie and Ottawa.

By Friday, less than a week after they began, InkSmith had received more than 1,000 3D printed headbands from volunteers and pledges for at least 1,000 more.

“We were blown away by the response of the 3D printing maker community and their willingness and their eagerness to help us,” said Braun.

Many volunteers have been laid off from other jobs and are eager to find a purpose while stuck at home.

“People have been setting an alarm three, four, five times throughout the night to get up and start a new print. We did not expect that type of commitment whatsoever when we originally put that call out,” she said.

Once at their facility, the headbands are sterilized and snapped together with a face shield. Five hundred have already been donated to hospitals in the Kitchener-Waterloo region.

Even with the donations flooding in, the limitations posed by 3D printing meant they weren’t going to be able to meet the massive demand.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

“Our team went back to the drawing board,” Braun said, “and we decided to create a fully laser-cut design.”

After rapid testing in local hospitals, the face shield was finalized Thursday and received Health Canada certification the same day, Braun said. InkSmith has now filled their 7,000-sq-ft warehouse with laser cutters and erected a temporary structure outside and should get production up to 10,000 masks a day very soon, she said.

Meanwhile out west, Dylan Gunn has gone from his day job as director of the Engineering Physics Project Lab at the University of British Columbia to a full-time project manager with the Vancouver Makers for Emergency Response and Support.

After reaching out to some colleagues and acquaintances on Facebook last week, Gunn is now working with some 50 people on a Slack chat channel to design, prototype, test and mass produce plastic intubation cabinets for frontline medical workers.

“It’s very organic. It leverages technology heavily,” said Gunn. “It’s great to see so many people coming online, but I really wanted to see this happen in a centralized way, because you can’t have 200 people showing up at the hospital with 200 different solutions.”

The group includes doctors, nurses and engineers and they are liaising with intensive care units from Kelowna to Victoria to determine need for the simple device that covers a patient’s head to protect doctors during invasive procedures like intubation that produce lots of contagious airborne contaminants.

Provincial health agencies are used to ordering mass quantities of medical supplies from global providers months or years in advance. During a health crisis like this, when borders are closed and deliveries delayed, makers can move more quickly and leverage their expertise to work with local industry and set up a supply chain and production line in a matter of days.

The group recognized early the difficulty of obtaining a reliable local supply of transparent plastic when large retail chains are also ordering plastic shields for their cashiers.

This week, Gunn secured enthusiastic commitments from a foam supplier and a laser manufacturer. When he called a large fruit packing company that makes plastic clamshells for strawberries and blueberries and found a willing partner in minutes.

“Immediately, I spoke to whoever’s in charge and they said: ‘we have thousands of pounds of (plastic). We can die cut it. Just tell us what we need to do, when and where it needs to go. We can worry about the costs later,’” he said.

Gunn says the experience has been exhausting, but it shows the how a diffuse group of people coming together over the internet can solve complex problems quickly.

“It’s amazing to see what people will do how they will come together and work in ways that conventionally were thought be impossible,” he said. “If we can do this, it could be the test case for finding solutions to climate change.”