The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
CT 3D Print Army: From idea into a mission to help
BRANFORD — During the darkest, most threatening early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when people were dying in nursing homes, hospitals were low on resources and health care professionals couldn’t get the personal protective equipment they needed, Ben and Ali Danker came up with a harebrained idea.
“If doctors, nurses and other medical professionals can’t get what they need, why not just make the stuff ourselves?”
Then they sprang into action.
Things happened with lightning speed — and after someone posted Ben Danker’s plea for help on Facebook, all these other people, many of them stuck quarantining in their own homes at that point, came out of the
woodwork.
They all wanted to help.
Ben Danker, a 32-year-old industrial designer, formed a Facebook group. People started posting pleas and ideas.
In a breathtakingly short period of time, dozens of people across the state and beyond — about 300 in all — jumped in to join them, and suddenly 3D printers were humming in warehouses, machine shops, middle schools, high schools and people’s basements across the state, cranking out plastic face shields and “ear savers.”
Suddenly, the idea wasn’t harebrained at all.
It was a movement.
The Connecticut 3D Print Army was born.
Ben Danker started a GoFundMe campaign, “and we raised $5,500, but we received more in private, anonymous donations,” he said.
Before they knew it, the Dankers had collected and distributed 7,000 plastic face shields — some of which were used earlier this month by Branford poll workers involved in the presidential primary. Others will be used by local teachers when school starts later this summer.
“My wife, Ali, helped me with all of this,” said Ben Danker. “While I went to work in Waterbury, Ali sat here and read my emails.”
Ali Danker, 31, who works at Shannon’s Fine Art Auctioneers in Milford, said that in some ways, “I would say we were lucky. At the beginning of COVID, so many people were bored” and just wanted to be able to do something to help.
“It was great. It was hard,” she said. “I will say that it was really encouraging and it was really wonderful to just ask people and have everybody just drop everything and help us,” Ali Danker said. “It was very surprising, it was very encouraging. It was really neat to see.”
At that point, of course, “Everybody was home,” she said.
While the Dankers have gotten most of the attention and credit, “we didn’t print these things,” she said. “But when we said, ‘Go!’ everything just took off! It was just so cool to get so many people involved.”
One 3D Print Army associate in Stratford, Gerad DeMezzo, working with his 12-year-old niece Willow Solderholm at home and at his machine shop in Milford, printed and distributed 15,000 face shields.
A third 3D Print Army associate in Southington, Nik Thomson, who initially owned two 3D printers, went out and bought 12-14 additional 3D printers “and started running another manufacturing wing out of Southington,” Ben Danker said. Thomson made and distributed 3,000 thinner, more disposable face shields of his own design and about 800 of Ben Danker’s design.
A company in Bristol, Better Molded Products, injection-molded about 2,500 of the 7,000 frames Ben Danker needed.
Sharon Pestilli, a member of the Fairfield Representative Town Meeting, brought face shields that members of the 3D Print Army printed out “to hospitals all over Fairfield County,” Danker said.
And these were just a few participants out of dozens, many of them computer or manufacturing geeks and hobbyists — along with some professionals — who took part in the effort.
Most amazingly, virtually all of them, working over a two- to threemonth period, donated their time and materials. Then they donated the 3D-printed (or in some cases injection-molded) products they made.
All for free.
“I think he saw a need and decided to go ahead and create a solution that was able to be produced,” said state Rep. Robin Comey, a Short Beach neighbor of the Dankers who honored and spotlighted them in May as part of her “Community Hero” series.
Comey distributed some of the face shields the Dankers made and donated to the North Branford Family Resource Center, ABC Learn With Me, day care centers serving the children of essential workers and, through Branford Democratic Registrar of Voters Dan Hally, to Branford poll workers.
If you haven’t heard of the Connecticut 3D Print Army, chances are you or someone you know or love probably benefited from its work just the same. No matter where you are in Connecticut, there’s a good chance someone you know either took part in the effort or received PPE from it.
Participants and donors were in Branford, where the Dankers live; North Branford, where the Dankers worked out of donated warehouse space; East Haven, where Current Inc. donated high-grade plastic to make tens of thousands of face shield lenses; and Waterbury, where Ben Danker worked at the start of the effort as a surgical support specialist at St. Mary’s Hospital, among many others.
Printers were loaned to the cause in a host of communities, including Bridgeport, where 8-10 3D printers at Housatonic Community College were put to use; at the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven; the Milford Public Library; Shelton Intermediate School; Waterbury’s Silas Bronson Library; Asnuntuck Community College in Enfield; and both Thomaston High School and the Thomaston Library, while Thule in Seymour, ABB in Plainville and Emerson in Danbury all donated 3D-printed frames, Danker said.
Volunteers all over Connecticut sorted, disinfected, inspected the quality, packed and delivered each face shield.
The face shields went to hospitals, nursing homes, manufacturing facilities, schools, fire departments, police departments and town hall offices all over the state, including New Haven, Bridgeport, Stamford, Greenwich, East Haven, Branford, Guilford, Derby, Seymour, Shelton, Wallingford, Waterbury, Southington, Southbury, Torrington, Farmington, Portland, Bristol, Berlin and beyond.
Even now, as school is ready to begin again, educators have been contacting Ben Danker, looking for face shields for protection as kids begin to return for in-person instruction. Among others, inquiries have come from Sliney Elementary School in Branford, Booker T. Washington Academy in New Haven and a school in East Hampton, said Ali Danker.
Beyond state lines, “We sent about 500 out to a hospital out in Elmira, N.Y.,” said Ben Danker. “We sent 100 down to a nursing home in New Jersey and 100 out to a nursing home in Brooklyn.”
Now that things are slowing down, Ben Danker remains glad he got involved, even though he ultimately lost his job at St. Mary’s, which is part of the Trinity Health network, when his volunteer effort conflicted a little too much with his day-to-day responsibilities.
He recently began a new job with a startup, Connecticut Biotech, out in South Windsor, which is one reason why he’s had to ramp down the volunteer effort at this point.
But at its height, the CT 3D Print Army had a serious head of steam.
The whole 3D Print Army effort began when Danker was working as a surgical support specialist for Dr. Philip Corvo, chairman of surgery at St. Mary’s, “making surgical simulations and prep models,” including models that could be printed out in 3D, he said.
“That’s how they knew I had a 3D printer,” Danker said, in in those early days, “They were desperate . ... They came to me and asked me, ‘Can you print this?’ and ‘Can you print that?’
“I was kind of thrown into this,” Danker said.
Then the chairman of surgery sent out an internal email saying, “If anybody needs anything, to contact me” — and it was shared on Facebook 3,000 times with the help of the Waterbury Observer, Danker said.
Suddenly, “My phone started ringing off the hook. I got phone calls from Florida, from Nevada, from Chicago ... from St. Francis, St. Mary’s ... all of the hospitals in the Trinity” network, he said.
Among those emails were messages from about 250 individuals and 150 companies that said, “We want to help,” he said.
At that point, Danker struck gold. “That was when I found a halfmillion face shields” at a plastics company in Shelton.
But when he ran that discovery up the chain of command, he found that Trinity had decided to ship them all to a distribution facility in Indiana, and “St. Mary’s would have have to bid against all 96 hospitals” in the network to get them, he said.
That’s when the “do-it-yourself” idea was born.
“That when I basically sourced enough material for about 20,000 face shields from a company in East Haven called Current Inc.,” Ben Danker said.
“We wanted to help Ben out. He’s friends with one of the crew on my boat,” said Brian Prinz Sr., who is a third-generation owner of the company.
Beyond that, “We just wanted to do our part,” Prinz said. “All these other people were working for free and we wanted to do what we could.”
Prinz said Current wasn’t looking for any sort of recognition — and he didn’t need to even have it named in this story.
“We pay our taxes, we have employees and we’ve been here for 40-something years,” he said.
Prinz just thought donating the material was the right thing to do — and said there’s more to a company than just making a profit.
“We’re part of the Chamber of Commerce, we donate to the fireworks and things that go on in the community,” Prinz said. “I don’t think we did anything more than anyone else.”
As the CT 3D Print Army effort unfolded, other companies got involved, from Stanley Black & Decker in New Britain to Assa Abloy, the parent company of Sargent Manufacturing Co. in New Haven, to ABB Materials in Plainville.
Beyond that, “I had kids, nieces, nephews — anyone with a 3D printer with the ability to print the file,” Danker said. “I sent out the file” and “had 250 (completed face shields) sent each day to a drop-off in Waterbury and about 250 a day to a dropoff point in Milford.”
Some of those were made by companies with blazing-fast, hightech industrial printers, “all the way down to guys ... that have little, junky printers at home and had their kids who were home from school who ran the machines while they were working.”
While Danker ultimately scaled back the original plan to crank out many more face shields, he now has to concentrate on his new paid job and just cleaned up and closed out the warehouse space donated by Engineering Specialities Inc., or ESI, in North Branford earlier this week, “I actually have enough for about 1,000 more shields,” he said.
He’s hoping someone who wants to put them together and distribute them contacts him.
Ask any member of the 3D Print Army and chances are they’ll have an amazing story to tell you.
“I found Ben online,” said DeMezzo, who lives in Stratford and owns GF Die and Machining in Milford. “He had posted” that he “was seeking 3D printing equipment ... I sent him an email and said, ‘I can definitely help out if you need assistance.’”
At the time, DeMezzo had three printers “and we turned around and bought 11 more ... and we started running, trying to get as much stuff out as possible.”
Throughout the past several months, as members of the CT 3D Print Army met on their Facebook page and got to know each other, “Everybody was willing to give up what would normally be their little secrets ... just to help out, which I think was really a great thing,” DeMezzo said.
“At this point, I printed 15,000 shields just on my printers,” he said — and like so many of the army’s other members, he did it all for free, just because it was needed and the right thing to do.
“My regular business is a tool and die shop ... a machine shop, basically,” DeMezzo said.
“I actually set up all the printers at my house so I could keep them running as fast and long as I could,” he said. “That’s how my niece got involved,” because he needed people to run the printers while he was at work.
And when DeMezzo started doing all that, he didn’t even know exactly who he was making the face shields for.
“It was kind of one of those things where we said ... regardless who is going to use them, we just need to get as many as we can into the hands of people who need them,” DeMezzo said. “We needed to keep those people safe so they could keep us safe.”
Midway through the effort, his wife Amy’s mother, who is in the Lord Chamberlain nursing home in Stratford, tested positive for COVID-19. “Luckily, it was mild enough that she just didn’t feel well for a few days” and ultimately recovered, he said.
Meanwhile, up in Southington, Thomson, 24, who owned two 3D printers at the start of the pandemic — and went to Syracuse University for industrial and interaction design — bought 12 or 14 additional 3D printers and got to work.
“I started printing out really simplified face shields” on thin plastic transparency paper, Thomson said.
“I had lots of connections, especially in the Southington Community Cultural Arts Center,” and he was able to get a grant through the center that originally was meant for graduating Southington High School seniors, but which no one had applied for.
“Initially I was looking for other printers, looking around at the local middle schools,” Thomson said.
In his mind, “it kind of like was, ‘I have the skills to really make a difference.’
“... That’s what was really weird. It was kind of organic,” he said. “All these makers, making masks or face shields or ear savers” and it all just happened.
The effort peaked a month or two ago and, at this point, “the actual demand has pretty much like completely diminished.”
Why?
Because now, “we actually have real businesses that pretty much took over the whole industry,” Thomson said.
Those business, unlike the CT 3D Print Army, “are selling stuff.”