I created this tool out of direct need for it when I was 3D printing PPE for my community at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This generator enables you to make stacks of face shields based on your printer’s parameters for easier mass-production!
Problem
3D printing face shield frames one at a time is slow and not the most efficient way to produce them in a large quantity. Inspired by Make Anything’s video on the topic, I started stacking them on top of each other to print many at once. However, doing this by hand was tedious, as every time I wanted to change the layer height, number of frames, or various settings, I had to recalibrate the spacing and vertical position of each frame individually.
Solution
I built a script in OpenSCAD to generate these vertical stacks of face shields given some parameters about your printer. Because this script automatically calculated all of the spacing, all I had to do was input the desired parameters and it would do the rest, which saved me lots of time.
I wanted to share what I’d created so that others could use it too, so I posted it on Thingiverse with Thingiverse Customizer support, which is their interface for running OpenSCAD files in the browser. You can find the files and source code there, as well as run the Customizer to generate your own stacks!
Funnily enough, sharing this on Thingiverse led to the creation of another project, as I ran into difficulty with what OpenSCAD commands Customizer supports. I ended up creating a file converter to solve this issue, which you can read more about here!