Laser Cut Face Shields

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Over the last week I've had more time and effort than I have had clear sheets of material, so I've been merrily 3D printing face shields with a mixture of Schonne Bakkes Goggles and 3DVerkstan full face visors. Now that I have a stack of vinyl covers arrive I can ramp up production and make use of my polypropylene sheets.

I've seen various designs but this one from Kitronik fits the bill nicely, plus Kitronik is my main material supplier so it's great to be able to support them at the same time. It uses a single A4 sheet of transparency, manufactured using a standard hole punch and simple rounded corners. The Headband is assembled from 3 pieces, a visor band, a forehead band and an adjustable band. The adjuster has a clever mechanism for linking into place and staying there using the natural flex of the material.


I've seen a lot of discussion about this design and how to optimise it for the different laser cutter sizes and also people saying that it can't be cut on a small 300x400 laser cutter. I think people have been looking at this the wrong way round though. You shouldn't be looking to optimise according to the laser cutter size, you should trying to get as many as you can out of the material you have. To this end I've redrawn the files to fit as many onto each of the Kitronik sheet sizes as possible. From there I've split the design up to fit into smaller laser cutters.
You have to use scissors/knife to cut the material down into sheet sizes that will fit into your laser cutter but you'll get more visors in total afterwards. Using this approach I've been able to chop a 1050x750mm single sheet up parts, each smaller than 300x400 and only lose one single visor when compared to cutting the whole sheet on a much larger machine. (svg files here)(pdf here)(dxf here)







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