(Spirit Lake)– A Lakes Area business is involved in a collaboration that’s manufacturing face shields. Rick Ayres of Lakes Marketing and Print in Spirit Lake tells KUOO news he came up with the idea after seeing an online post…
“Well about six or seven weeks ago I saw a link in one of my Linked In groups that said own a 3-D printer, save a life. A friend of mine, Adam Perry from Peterson has a 3-D printer so I sent it to him and he was starting to look at printing the 3-D part but he couldn’t do the face shield portion. So I came up with a way to make that clear, plastic shield out of film lamination and we were going to do 50 or 100 and donate them locally and walk away and feel good like we contributed. We put a Facebook post up that went viral. It has reached about 70,000 people and been shared over 400 times and then the phone started ringing.”
Ayres says the collaboration quickly grew and that combined, they now have close to 30 3-D printers turning out the gear…
“We’ve got Shawn Stone is a science professor from BV University, he’s running, I don’t know, five or six printers at his house right now; Adam Perry down in Peterson, he’s the band director at Sioux Rapids, and he’s brought more printers. I think he’s got six running at his location. Chris Shanahan, who owns the Mail House down in Sioux City, he was running nine printers, he sent two up to me because I just said you know, I can run some for you, I don’t know much about 3-D printing but I can hit the start button. And we also have Iowa Lakes Community College, Chad Tisher is running, I think he’s got several printers also running over there, they’re part of our little consortium that we’ve put together. And I’ve got a couple people that want to be anonymous that are also running 3-D printers and contributing to our group effort.”
Ayres says a route truck from the Mail House drives through all the communities and picks up the head bands and delivers them to Lakes Marketing and Printing for final assembly.
Ayres says they’ve manufactured about 3,000 face shields to date and expects their manufacturing operation will continue for some time to come…
“I see us doing this for atleast another couple of weeks if not further. Yeah, it’s been interesting to see all the people that need it. At the beginning it was kind of heart and gut renching to just hear the desperation in people’s voices because they didn’t have any PPE like this. And then you could almost kind of hear their spirits lift a little bit on the phone when they would hear we had a solution, that we would be able to get them some and you know, now more and more people are getting out and big manufacturers are fulfilling the need, but we’re still selling quite a few and have a lot of people locally that maybe don’t like the PPE that they have, and by locally I mean northwest Iowa. They like ours because it’s comfortable and it works well and so they’ve been buying it personally.”
Ayres adds his business has also been working with area restaurants in developing an easy online ordering system, helping get their menus online.
