(WSB photo, last month)

Since we first reported a week and a half ago on West Seattle’s strong>Nucor Steel making face shields with 3-D printers, the effort has scaled up in a big way. Here’s an update Nucor sent us to share with you:

After the initial deliveries, the massive scope of the shortage of appropriate personal-safety equipment became more apparent.

To scale up production beyond its initial capability of 100 face shields per week, Nucor Seattle turned to the community, collaborating with the West Seattle Blog to help elevate the effort in the West Seattle neighborhood, where Nucor Seattle’s mill has operated for more than 100 years. The resulting response included several area high schools, technical schools, and residents, who have loaned idle equipment or are using personal equipment to print components and donate supplies for assembly at the steel mill.

Nucor now estimates its capacity at around 100 face shields per day and growing.

School partners include: Franklin Pierce School District, West Sound Tech, Seattle Christian, the
Chehalis School District, and the Tacoma School District.

The first production of about 20 face shields was donated April 2nd to Providence Mount St. Vincent, a long-term-care facility located around a mile from Nucor Seattle’s mill and with which Nucor Seattle has partnered for the last decade.

Since last week, around 500 shields have been delivered to area hospitals, clinics, and care facilities. The team at Nucor Seattle has so far focused on immediate support for the public health response:

• Donation of excess Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) to local area medical centers, including hundreds of N95 dust masks and nitrile gloves.

• Organizing on-site additive manufacturing (3D printing) capabilities and expanding efforts to include teammates, local schools, and community resident-owned equipment to help address critical shortages in PPE.

Nucor Seattle engineers specializing in additive manufacturing have worked around-the-clock to research needs and test designs. Currently, the effort is focused on producing National Institutes of Health (NIH) approved face shields for medical workers and frontline caregivers. Nucor is now printing holders for these face shields and has purchased and received donated plastic and straps under the guidelines issued by the NIH. Nucor is also researching and designing various forms of respirator components that can be fitted with household media such as coffee and vacuum filters.

“Our teammates are working hard to design, optimize and produce materials approved by the National Institutes of Health, as well as reaching out to local medical centers and caregivers to learn how we can best support them on the frontlines of this public health crisis,” said Patrick Jablonski, Environmental Manager. “When our community learned of this effort, they stepped up to help and we have gone from 100 face shields in a week to about 100 face shields per day. We are proud to be able to use our resources to contribute to solutions but we are even more humbled by the response and immediacy with which our neighbors acted to help. We are all in this together.”

More than 300 people work at Nucor in West Seattle, which describes itself as “the biggest recycler in Washington State, using recycled scrap to produce materials used in building projects.”