Kyle Rankin (left) and Nicholas Adams from Kamloops Makerspace have been manufacturing PPE since the beginning of the pandemic last March (Image Credit: CFJC Today)

By Chad Klassen

PANDEMIC HEROES

HEROES OF THE PANDEMIC: Kamloops Makerspace life-savers in manufacturing faceshields, barriers for community

Mar 19, 2021 | 4:54 PM

KAMLOOPS — In the final installment of our week-long series “Heroes of the Pandemic,” we applaud the efforts of volunteers at the Kamloops Makerspace who have spent the last year providing much-needed personal protective equipment. While the organization shut down in the early parts of the pandemic, it quickly pivoted to produce the PPE.

Nicholas Adams and Kyle Rankin have dedicated thousands of hours making the necessary personal protective equipment (PPE) the community has needed.

“We got into it because there was really a movement of makers around the world working on different medical devices,” said chair of the Kamloops Makerspace Nicholas Adams. “Some people were 3D-printing components for ventilators. Some people were, of course, manufacturing sewn masks.”

The Makerspace shut down when the pandemic started, but mere weeks later, they shift their focus to making faceshields for the hospital.

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“I would say we had about four different designs inside of a day,” said Adams. “We were bringing those up to the hospital and they were trying out different things. We had this design at about a week and a half and went into manufacturing pretty steadily from there.”

Altogether, they’ve made about 10,000 faceshields in the last year. The Royal Inland Hospital Foundation, which provided the Makerspace with a $5,000 grant to produce some of the shields, says people like Adams and Rankin have been life-savers for healthcare workers.

“They were incredible,” said CEO of the RIH Foundation Heidi Coleman. “Nicholas and his team, they were in there at night. They turned on the electricity and they were there at all hours pushing out these faceshields because they understood that they had to get these faceshields into the community. If it wasn’t for them, we would not had those thousands and thousands of facesheilds.”

The Makerspace has also been producing plastic barriers, mainly for non-profits in Kamloops that couldn’t afford nor could find any for protection.

“We work almost exclusively with non-profits who couldn’t get those any other way,” Adams said. “Even if they didn’t have the funds to do it, there’s been a real shortage in the other people who were manufacturing them and the prices were quite high.”

While production on the barriers and faceshields have slowed down, Adams and his team are still working to provide non-profit groups with what they need. Their work has already made a big difference in helping Kamloops get through the pandemic.

“I remember handing them to some individuals and having them almost break down into tears because they couldn’t find it anywhere else and then could have it now and they could have that peace of mind.”