This machine used to cut carbon fiber for Amazon drones is now cutting face shields. (Image courtesy of Amazon)
Amazon (NSDQ:AMZN) announced today that it’s making face shields designed partially in-house available to the public at cost.
The face shields are priced at $66.25 for a pack of 25, or $2.65 per shield, which the company said is a third less than the cost of all other reusable face shields currently available to frontline workers.
Engineers from Amazon’s drone delivery team — including its mechanical design and hardware teams joined forces with a community group of 3D printing enthusiasts in Washington State in early March, according to a blog post by Amazon robotics engineer Brad Porter. The group had been working on its own design and was building face shields by hand out of their homes and offices.
According to Porter, Amazon engineers in one week took feedback from medical professionals to improve the quality of the materials to allow the shields to be reusable, added an enhanced snap feature to keep the shield in-place, amended the geometry to reduce sharp edges that could snag clothing or hair, thinned the forehead band to reduce pressure on a person’s forehead, and drastically improved print time making them quicker to manufacture. The company also repurposed its manufacturing facilities and began working with outside vendors to produce these new face shields quickly and inexpensively.
Amazon also said it has donated 30,000 more face shields than its originally anticipated 10,000, and plans to donate another 150,000 by the end of this year. The company made its National Institutes of Health-approved face shield design open-source for both 3D printing and injection molding in May.
