Stockpiles of medical supplies are running near empty across the United States as the COVID-19 outbreak continues. Despite the dreariness of lockdown and quarantine, people continue to step up and help their local communities out in any way possible. One such individual is Stevens senior Dominic Dell Antonia, who has used his 3D printing business to fabricate over 1,000 face shields for medical workers across the tri-state area.
Founded in January of 2019 concurrently with his chemical engineering studies, DDA LLC is the name of Dell Antonia’s 3D printer repair business. With a great personal interest in 3D printing technology, Dell Antonia’s array of printers has quickly grown to a dozen.
Seeing the increasing demand for personal protective equipment (PPE), Dell Antonia refused to sit idle. Instead, he decided to put his time and resources to work.
“I’m forty minutes from New York City. It’s surreal. It’s sobering. Some of my friends got Coronavirus. Some of my friends’ family members died from Coronavirus,” Dell Antonia explained. “The last straw for me was when my grandparents started getting worried. At that point, it was time to do something.”
He found open source STL files for face shields, powered up his ensemble of 3D printers, and reached out to his local community through Facebook. “I sent a picture of my basement and said ‘I’ve got a dozen 3D printers, put me to work.’”
From there, everything exploded.
Dell Antonia was then contacted by many medical centers and assisted living homes in dire need of PPE. As of Friday, April 10, over 1,000 face shields have been printed and donated to medical workers and first responders who need them most.
“Each face shield ranges from forty minutes to four hours, depending on the printer,” he described. Striving to improve efficiency, he even switched to a model allowing him to print four at a time overnight.
Committed to the cause, Dell Antonia elaborated, “that means I’m pretty much down here all day. I’ll do my schoolwork and my classes. If I see a print done, I’ll try to sneak away from the computer and get it going again. I’m pretty tired.”
With the basement acting as his new living quarters, Dell Antonia tries to avoid making the deliveries himself whenever he can help it. “If I do have to do a delivery,” he says, “I go out with my mask, I go out with my gloves, and I try not to touch anything. I stay away from people and be extra careful. If I bring something home to a 77 and 78 year-old, it’s usually not very good.”
Instead, he’s been receiving delivery help from people that he used to go to high school with. One notable individual has been Penn State undergraduate Jakob Haiman, who Dell Antonia refers to as his right-hand man.
“Jakob picked up 18 kg of filament for me, which is about 2-3 weeks worth. The issue was he had to pick it up at a local electronics store and they only let 15 people in at a time. He waited in that parking lot over 3 hours,” Dell Antonia explained.
On top of that, Jakob has continuously volunteered to run the deliveries for Dell Antonia across New York and New Jersey.
“I wouldn’t have been able to do a lot of what I’ve done in the past two weeks without his selfless sacrifice,” Dell Antonia mentioned.
Undeniably, this adventure has cost Dell Antonia and his friends more than just time and energy. The project initially started as self-funded, but as demand for face shields grew, so did the need for plastic filament. Current limits in place on bulk shipping have made it challenging for him to get his hands on filament.
As of now, he has opened a fundraiser on Facebook and has already received over $5,500 in contributions from supporters.
If you’d like to support Dell Antonia’s endeavors, you can find his Facebook fundraiser here.
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