Generating Joy Part 2: Covid Heroes
- Laurence Clarkberg
- Dec 22, 2025
- 13 min read
Updated: Dec 22, 2025
by Laurence Clarkberg
This is part two of a five-part series about the Ithaca Generator to accompany the Generating Joy show at the Cherry Gallery from 1/23/26 to 3/8/26.
These are days that shake the world. Heady times that test our ideals. WYD?
My girlfriend Judy and I have been weathering the pandemic by watching apocalyptic movies. First we watched the one in which Bruce Willis and a ragtag crew of goofy roughnecks saves the world from a comet on a collision course with the Earth. Hurray! That one provided a certain satisfactory kind of comfort; in spite of its Hollywood cheesiness, it gave us a palpable faith in humanity’s ability to overcome difficulties. And then we watched that other one, a foreign film, more pessimistic, but perhaps more realistic, in which a planetoid slams into the Earth destroying all life here and there is nothing we can do about it and the movie implicitly asks us “How do we feel about that?” That one provided a different kind of comfort, the relief that someone trapped in a nightmare feels upon waking, relief that it was all just a dream and now that we are awake even though we are in the middle of a horrific world-wide pandemic let’s be grateful for what we have, let’s be grateful that we can all sit around (furthermore, are mandated to sit around!) watching movies and eating popcorn. Hurray, sort of.
Movies have some healing power, for sure, but the comfort they provide is short-lived and shallow. For true inspiration we need real stories. Real stories of real people we know who are not just sitting around watching movies about heroes, but who are themselves heroes, people who are extending themselves to help us, their community, in our time of need. We need the comfort of knowing that our friends and neighbors are not just going to hoard food and run off to live in the woods leaving us to fend for ourselves. We need faith that we will all work together to meet the challenges that come along. Real stories provide us with that faith. Here is one such story, about some ordinary citizens like you and me who rose above their own petty concerns and contributed something of value to our community in this time of need.
First some background. A bad thing has been happening in our country for the past couple of decades, something that has gone largely unnoticed by mainstream America, but has been deeply felt by a select group of people who call themselves Makers. That bad thing is this: we have lost the joy of making, and we have given away our tools, and our jobs, and to some extent our souls, and we have deprived our children of the joy of making. All over America the woodshops and the ink shops and the metal shops in our high schools have been shut down and the tools sold off. And our manufacturing capability has been outsourced. (A real journalist would add a graph here to prove this point but I don’t have to do that because you know it’s true, don’t you?)
The creative potential of our nation is being siphoned off, and the Makers have attempted to stem that tide by setting up janky little underground workshops in most major cities which they call Makerspaces, and the Makers have been physically intervening in the high schools’ attempts to bring their table saws and band saws to the dump, and they have been providing a home for those tools, and also bringing in tools too expensive for any one Maker’s spouse to approve the purchase of, like laser cutters and 3D printers, and they have been begging the citizens of their towns to learn how to use those tools, and thereby rediscover the joy of making, all for a paltry fee of like $20 a month, which barely pays the rent. And the Makerspaces have been failing, one by one, and the joy of making has been blinking out of existence in our culture.
Fast forward to April 2020. The story begins. Act One: A dangerous virus has been stalking the people. A necessary tool for the protection of our medical professionals is a simple plastic face shield. The acquisition officer brings it up on Amazon and clicks “Order”. “Out of Stock!” cries Amazon. “Out of Stock!” The acquisition officer panics. “Something’s wrong with our China! I can’t get any face shields!” In our small sweet college town a professor at the medical school asks the engineering department for help. “Can you make some face shields for us? We are really desperate!” they say. The engineers call on the Makers and the Makers take up the cause. We see a ragtag crew of goofy Makers swaggering into view:
Elliot Wells, Ithaca Generator’s handsome and capable president (who will no doubt be played by Bruce Willis when the movie comes out);
Jon Sanders, blonde and beautiful bio-tech engineer who recently developed low-cost 3D-printed versions of his lab equipment;
Josh DeRosa, Ithaca Generator’s dark-haired, mysterious and resourceful 3D Printer Area Captain;
Jason Youngers, stalwart pessimistic machinist of the group, like Scotty on the Starship Enterprise, who has filled his house to capacity with machine tools;
Gerry Monaghan, moody artist of the group, renowned for his elaborate sculptures made entirely of toothpicks.
The janky little underground workshop at the Ithaca Generator swings into action. “Take a look at this Swedish face shield design that has been approved by NIH! We can 3D-print the headbands and then use overhead transparencies for the shield part!” cries Jon.
“But how can we possibly print enough headbands with our makerspace’s three puny 3D printers? They take way too long to print!” complains Jason, the pessimist.
“We can buy two dozen 3D printers and Josh can help me train our members on Zoom to print them!” cries Jon.
“How can we possibly pay for all those printers?” Jason opines.
“I’ll set up a facebook fundraiser for the 3D printers right now!” Elliot says, reaching for his laptop.
“And I’ll set up a fundraiser to buy a vinyl cutter to cut the face shields!” says Jason, newly converted into an optimist. “And even though there is no more room in my house for any more tools I will find room for the vinyl cutter anyway!”
And so our heroes persevere, working tirelessly day and night, to produce and deliver 13,000 face shields to medical professionals all over New York state. Along the way lawyers, businessmen, insurance agents and politicians attempt to entangle our heroes in red tape. The Makers do an end run around the red tape.
Act Two: “The big injection mold companies are finally making the headbands, but now we’re running out of overhead transparencies!” cries Gerry, the moody artist. The camera pans to Elliot’s look of consternation which gradually changes into a look of determination. His fingers slowly rise and then fall like thunderstorm raindrops onto the keys of his laptop. “I’ve just gotten a bottling company in New Hampshire to donate a 1,700 pound roll of clear plastic sheet,” he announces. “It should arrive by freight tomorrow.”
The next day: “Houston we’ve got a problem,” says Jason the Scottish-like realist. “The roll of clear plastic is too heavy to lift and we can’t get it in the door.”
Again Elliot’s fingers like raindrops fall onto the keys of his laptop. “I’ve just gotten a cider company on South Hill to donate a pallet and pallet jack. They should be here within two hours.” The Makers breathe a sigh of relief and production resumes.
The team works to themselves to the point of exhaustion. “We just can’t cut up and hole punch the transparencies fast enough!” cries Gerry.
“She can’t take any more!” cries Jason.
“I’ll get my friends at the Ithaca College print shop to cut the big roll into sheets!” says Josh.
“And I’ll get my friend in Lodi who has a print shop that uses 80-year-old letterpress presses capable of die cutting this thick clear plastic to die cut all the transparencies!” cries Gerry. The team quickly produces 40,000 face shield parts.
“How about we get member Aaron Zufall to make a cool website so that people can request the face shields and donate money?” suggests Jason. We’ll put it up at https://ppe.ithacagenerator.org.
Elliot spins around in his captain’s chair to face the camera. “Make it so,” he commands.
The production process accelerates and countless medical professionals are saved as a result, and they express their gratitude on Insta and facebook.
Act Three: The citizens of Ithaca and beyond rally to the cause, the virus is vanquished, the Generator is recognized as a great asset to the community, everyone in town joins the Generator and starts making stuff, the Generator is saved from financial ruin, and everyone lives happily ever after.
That’s how I would tell the story, anyway. Maybe some exaggeration has crept into it. Please forgive me. Perhaps I should let Jon tell the story. The rest of this article is an interview I conducted with Jon last week. I have edited some parts for clarity which I have noted with square brackets.
[Transcript of my interview with Ithaca Generator member Jon Sanders on 5/17/20.]
“[Ithaca Generator has been spearheading an effort to make face shields to protect people from the COVID-19 virus.] It started when doctors at Cornell’s Weill medical school asked people in Cornell’s engineering department for anything they could help out with. They had this face shield design they found from a Swedish maker group to help prevent virus transmission. The medical people asked the engineering people for as many as they could crank out. I was contacted by one of the faculty who knew I was associated with Ithaca Generator and that’s what got the ball rolling. From there it was kind of a mad scramble to get as many people involved as possible because 3D printing is a very slow process, so any one printer can not produce very many [face shields] very quickly, so we needed to find as many people who have 3D printers as possible to produce them. There were also logistical considerations with the sanitizing process and delivery and it was all very ad hoc!”
Me: “The regular channels for doing this sort of thing failed us and it just astonishes me that it fell upon the hobbyists to do something this important!”
“A lot of it came down to disruptions in existing supply channels and the length of time it takes for the regular tooling up process [of large-volume manufacturers]. The really cool thing about 3D printing is that there is zero lead up time required to print new things. [When you finish printing one object you can just load up the file for a completely different object and start printing that.] Whereas, with injection molding, which is how these sorts of parts would normally be mass-produced, you have to make a die that has to be carefully designed, and machined, so that the plastic can flow appropriately, and that all takes a couple of weeks, even if you can drop everything and focus on that. So what happened here is, people needed [these face shields] yesterday, and it was better to get a few thousand 3D printed parts right away rather than zero conventionally manufactured parts. And that’s where we filled in. And since then, there have been molds made by Proto Labs, which is a [high volume] manufacturing company. So now there are actually injection molded parts available. [However, there is still a role for 3D printed parts.] For Proto Labs to do a run, they need to have a minimum purchase of several thousand parts, at around $1.50 a part. So that becomes a logistical issue because of the money required. Large hospitals are able to make that large a purchase directly from Proto Labs. But smaller facilities like nursing homes and fire departments, they may not know about or have access to those conventional manufacturers and so what we’re doing now is we’re shifting towards trying to fill those low volume local needs. So it’s still beneficial for us to be able to use our 3D printers to fill, for example, an order of 50 face shields for a nursing home in Corning.”
Me: “What are some of the places who are receiving face shields?”
“We’ve got a list of people who have requested shields through our website [at https://ppe.ithacagenerator.org].The first couple of weeks it was all just a mad scramble trying to get face shields to the people who needed them. It was a very distributed process. It was like a ‘cell’ based organization. No one knew everything that was going on. That was extremely exhausting. We were focussed 24 hours a day to make it happen, because every person becomes an essential link. After a couple weeks of that, the Cornell people had to pull out, [because they were working full-time as professors in addition to managing the PPE project]. Ithaca Generator took over and one of our members, Aaron Zufall, made an amazing website that makes it easy for small groups to sign up and request face shields. There have been 31 requests made through the website so far, and we’ve sent out 14,000 face shields in response.”
“We’ve sent out about 13,000 pieces prior to the website, and since the website we’ve shipped 14,000, so about 30,000 total. [Each face shield has two parts. The first part is a 3D printed headband. The second part is a clear plastic sheet, basically an 8.5 x 11 overhead transparency, that can be three-hole punched and then clipped to the headband.] [Now that more and more of the headbands are being produced by large-volume injection molded processes,] most of the throughput we’re providing is cutting and delivering the clear plastic shields. Through contacts at IG we were able to source large volumes of this clear plastic material. We got a donation of like 40,000 overhead transparencies. So we sent them out to people. But they are kind of flimsy, some people like a thicker material, and Elliot was able to source some heavier material from a makerspace in New Hampshire that had gotten it donated from a soda bottle company. [It was delivered to us as a 1,200 pound roll.] So we needed people to cut it. Gerry knew someone who runs a printing press in Lodi NY who was able to make a die to die-cut the shields, which is much faster than three-hole punching them. We also bought a vinyl cutter for cutting them. Jason was behind that. And he made several thousand on the vinyl cutter, which got shipped out early on. And once we got the die-cutter set up we’ve been ferrying them up to Lodi to get punched and distributed. So now we’ve got shelves of these.”
“So now that we’ve got injection molds making the headbands, the limiting factor is the shield part. And so we’re working with a group out of New York City that has bought 30,000 injection molded [headbands] from Proto Labs and through us they are able to get the transparencies that are being die-cut.”
Me: “One point of success with a makerspace is that you can ship very quickly. And there is no red tape because [no one is really in charge] and no one is getting paid. Good will is a good [motivating factor] because you don’t have to waste time thinking about who is going to get paid and where is the money coming from. But one aspect of that, and I want to emphasize this in the article, the Ithaca Generator is losing money and is predicted to go out of business by December at this rate.”
“So we were able to fundraise in the community really quickly and a lot of people were very generous with money to support the project. And that’s what allowed us to get materials. I think we purchased something like two or three hundred kilos [four to six hundred pounds] of 3D printer plastic that’s been made into headbands. And we’ve fully cut one 1,200 pound roll of clear plastic and we have another one that we’re working on.”
“I think all of us who have been involved have become burned out. Because it’s been, what, two months now. But I think the demand is leveling off because conventional supply channels are opening up now. Hospitals are able to source the PPE that they are used to using. So this emergency stuff isn’t as necessary for many institutions.”
“We fund-raised about $15,000 [through facebook] and we’ve spent all of that [and started going into our savings]. There have been some other direct donations. We’ve set up the website so that people can donate. We send out people’s requests immediately, but we have an option that people can donate to support specific requests. So with that, currently about 59% of the items have been covered by donations. A fair assessment would be that we’ve donated about $30,000 worth of in-kind materials and time [to our community].”
Me: “Even though new requests are partially funded, the situation is somewhat dire. We need donations to keep doing this work.”
“[The fundraising was for more than just materials.] One of our fund-raisers was to get 25 to 30 3D printers into the community, and then train people to use them to produce PPE. All of the printers were funded by that fund-raiser. Almost all of the recipients had never used a 3D printer before. So me and Josh taught online classes to train them. We did three people per class and did eight or nine classes. It was an ongoing thing.”
“We ended up choosing a model of 3D printer that was popular so that there were a lot of resources online, and parts available. And capacity. It was difficult to find enough 3D printers [on short notice]. We chose the Ender 3 from Creality. I’ve got two of our IG printers in my basement. They’ve been breaking down [too]. They’re not meant to run 24 hours a day. So I’ve had to fix every printer at least three or four times. I’ve basically spent six weeks doing this full time. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been able to pull back and do some [of my paid] work. It’s been a really cool learning experience and it’s been really cool seeing how many people wanted to pitch in. We were thinking it would be really great if we could hire someone to manage it on an on-going basis.”
Me: “This project has a proven record of success and it’s doing important things.”
“It is in particular serving places that can’t afford to buy PPE. That’s what it’s doing now. It’s hard to predict how long there will be a need for this project. We’ve been very conservative about what we’ve been making because we want to only make what medical professionals trust. And this face shield is one thing. It’s been approved by NIH. There are many things that will fit that criteria. If there is another design that meets that demand, then we can make it. And if there are more people in the community who want face shields [other than medical professionals, such as grocery store clerks], we can keep making them. Face shields can be disposable, and they are easily sanitized. This design is really easy to sanitize. We’re using a material that is amenable to sanitizing. Also, we have the human resources set up, so it would be really easy to pivot to producing a different item.”
Jon was in the process of training a volunteer to sanitize the PPE, so I wrapped up the interview and let him go. So that’s the story of what our local makers are doing. WYD? WYD?
Coming up next: Generating Joy Part 3: Art Bikes and Beyond at Ithaca Generator.
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