The leaders of Maker Nexus, a new non-profit maker space in Sunnyvale, assure us the maker movement is far from over. In fact, they say the COVID-19 pandemic is giving some makers a new mission.

Aditya Indla, a sophomore at Bellarmine College Prep in San Jose, started a GoFundMe campaign that has raised more than $5,000 for Maker Nexus, a nonprofit that is using 3D printers to created face shields for healthcare workers.

In Sunnyvale, California, community workspace nonprofit Maker Nexus has been running its 13 3D printers and three laser cutters nonstop. The company produced 1,800 masks for local hospitals and now has requests for another 13,000.

On Monday, volunteers from Maker Nexus, a Bay Area non-profit organization that provides members with access to tools like laser cutters and 3D-printers to produce objects for practical and artistic purposes, delivered the first set of 500 reusable face shields to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center.

“This could be a potential brand new supply chain for us,” said Sanjay Kurani, medical director at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. “It’s a great symbiotic relationship.”

Maker Nexus, a nonprofit in Sunnyvale, has become face shield central. [...]

“Within two weeks, they got us three different prototypes,” said Michael Elliot, chief operating officer of the Valley Medical Center Foundation. “They were able to make adjustments to it based on the feedback from our medical and our nursing and our infectious control staff, and on Monday, they delivered the first 500 units.”

In Sunnyvale, a group called Maker Nexus is working on 3D printing face shields that are being given to hospitals for free. Maker Nexus says that they’ve gotten all their members together and they’re producing between 500 and 1,000 face shields per day.

This week, the Valley Medical Center Foundation and the Sunnyvale nonprofit Maker Nexus announced an initiative to produce 3,000 face shields a week.

He pointed me to an elegant Face Shield design from the Maker Nexus makerspace in Sunnyvale, California.

We're in a middle of a pandemic that's of a scope that we don't really understand and most of us have no direct control over," said Wells, "but it's easy to forget that there's a huge number of things we do have control over. And if we are working together and we're collaborating, and we're using the tools at our disposal, we can get a tremendous amount done.

Innovation is part of the fabric of the Bay Area, so when the medical community said that they were running low on their personal protective equipment, the Maker community, and all their 3D printers, came to the rescue. Dozens of specialized 3D printers are building face shields. One makes headbands that will be attached to plastic sheets while another makes reinforcement parts for the bottom of the shields. It's all volunteer work by the Sunnyvale-based nonprofit Maker Nexus.