- I spent the past week designing an open source
3D printed gas mask.
This year has been an all out assault
on our respiratory systems.
First, it's COVID, now it's tear gas and pepper spray.
The maker community stepped up
and has been 3D printing face shields
to keep our nurses and doctors safe,
and now I think it's time that we step up
and make things to protect our brothers and sisters
out in the streets.
No one's voice should be silenced
because they lack the necessary protective equipment,
so I designed an open source gas mask
that can be made using any 3D printer
and a few materials from any hardware store.
I had an electronics video I was gonna post last weekend,
but watching everything that's been unfolding
across the U.S. it just didn't feel right to post it.
So I set it aside, and I've been working on this.
Tear gas and pepper spray are being used
to silence peaceful protesters.
Not only that, they make people cough uncontrollably
which dramatically increases the risk of spreading COVID.
In addition, they're extremely dangerous for asthmatics,
not just people protesting, but bystanders,
and people who just live in the neighborhoods
that tear gas is being used in.
I think we're gonna see a lot more tear gas use this year,
and I wanna make sure that everyone who is exposed to it
has the ability to protect themselves.
And just like we haven't been able to rely
on commercial supply chains for face shields,
I don't think we should be relying
on being able to buy gas masks, you know,
over the counter or through the mail.
And while there are some existing DIY designs,
they tend to use really specialty items
like full face snorkel masks,
which are being used in open source ventilators lines,
and thus are in high demand.
So I've designed a gas mask that can be 3D printed
and only relies on other materials
that can be found at any hardware store.
I think it's important to point out,
we don't need to equip everyone in a crowd with gas masks.
We just need to equip enough people
such that there can be small dedicated teams
to step in and neutralize tear gas canisters
as they're fired, using the techniques pioneered
by the protesters in Hong Kong.
Alright, so let's talk about the design a little bit.
I wanted to make something that didn't look super military
and scary, hence the pink color,
of course, it's gonna be whatever color
the person that prints it is gonna use
but I didn't wanna use the traditional black.
Gas masks are usually made out of rubber,
so one of the downsides of 3D printing
is that it's gonna be relatively rigid,
and I tried to account for that.
So I started with a 3D scan of my head,
I needed a model to work on.
So I use an iPhone app called Scandy Pro,
and the immediate problem that I had
is that I have tons of hair, and I was getting a model
with tons of hair, and really I just wanted a shape
of the skin and head and obviously the face to get the,
you know, to fit on the face as good as possible.
So, what would have been perfect is like a nylon stocking
to pull over my head, you know, bank robber style,
but I didn't have one of those
so I ended up using saran wrap
which was far more terrifying.
(saran wrap rustling)
Okay I can breathe.
But worked relatively well,
with some cleanup I got a pretty decent model out of it.
So I think the biggest challenge is getting a good seal
on the face, both around the outer edges,
and then most of the designs that I looked at
for commercial gas masks had a separate enclosed part
around the nose and mouth so I replicated that as well.
And my guess is that that's so that there's
a smaller breathing area, but your eyes are still covered,
but there's a separate breathing area
that has a separate seal,
so you sort of have two seals, you have the outer seal
and then the inner seal.
For the seals themselves, I decided to use
that sticky backed foam, like weatherstripping,
which you can find at just about any hardware store.
But because that seal is so crucial,
it's really important to get the exact design of the flange
that that foam fits onto exactly right.
And I spent a whole bunch of time,
probably spent the majority of the time
getting that design of those, just that flat part
that would press up against your face exactly right.
At least for my face,
it's obviously gonna need to be tweaked for other faces.
So obviously the inside layer here
is that weather stripping foam and then if we hide that,
you can see the actual 3D printed part,
this needs a little bit of cleanup here
but you get the general idea.
This would then all be 3D printed.
For the face shield.
I envision using like a clear, two liter bottle,
but I'm worried that's gonna be a little bit thin,
so maybe the alternative is, you know,
clear acrylic or plexiglass, that's heated over a form
with a heat gun and sort of slumped into shape.
This is actually cut out of a cylinder,
so it's it's only bent in one direction,
it's not bent in multiple directions
so it doesn't need to be like cast or poured.
I thought that was really important,
perhaps most important is what is the filter material.
So, the other DIY gas mask designs I've seen
use activated charcoal which is actually
what's used in the commercial designs, as well.
So, they make a sandwich of like cotton batting,
or cotton pads, and then crushed activated charcoal
and then some more cotton batting.
Activated charcoal's relatively easy to get.
It's used in aquarium filters,
so you can get it at pet stores,
I would imagine you probably can get it at hardware stores
but I don't know immediately what they sell it for.
And if you don't have access to it at all
it's relatively easy to make.
If you saw the last video,
it's pretty easy to make charcoal and you can activate it,
which is really just oxygenating it,
using some relatively easy to get
over the counter chemicals.
You obviously need straps to hold it on your face,
I envisioning either a rubber or like an elastic strap,
there's five hooks for straps around the outside of the mask
and then something in back to sort of tie
the five straps together, I didn't design that part
but it would be relatively easy.
You could imagine some sort of thing that has five loops
for the straps to go through.
So the canister where the charcoal goes
has a bunch of holes in the bottom,
you put cotton batting in that next and then your charcoal
and then cotton batting on top and then it just screws into
the mask itself.
I wanna to make it clear, this is just a V1, V0.1 even,
my hope is that I can enlist some of you
in helping with this and helping refine this,
I think this is particularly relevant, not just in the U.S.,
but all around the world right now.
There are a number of things that need to still be done,
and this design, obviously needs to be refined.
I don't currently have access to a 3D printer
here on the Native American reservation where I'm staying.
I'm working on getting one,
but obviously it needs to be test printed
and the design needs to be refined.
I ran it through Simplify 3D and it was estimating
like 45 hours on a standard commercially available printer,
which is a lot, that's a really long print.
So, I'm not an expert, I'm not an expert at 3D printing,
I'm not an expert mechanical engineer,
so I'm hoping that other people have some ideas
on both how to make the design better
but also how to decrease the printing time.
We obviously need to print it out and test the fit
on different faces, test out the foam gasket,
and make sure that that provides a sufficient seal,
and then we need to actually test out the filter material
and make sure that activated charcoal works.
I've seen people testing DIY gas mask designs
with various like aerosol air fresheners
and that sort of thing where you spray a lot into a can
or into a room and and see if filters those,
if it filters those, then you know it'll filter
other aerosols like tear gas.
There's even this video where they tested a very low tech,
homemade gas mask design using pepper spray,
like an aerosol pepper spray
that they bought off the internet.
(loud coughing)
- Oh man.
- If you'd like to try printing one of these,
or you'd like to get involved in refining the design,
click on the link down in the description for more info.
I wanna talk a bit about Black Lives Matter,
the groundswell movement to reform the police
and racism at large.
I'm white, this is uncomfortable
and difficult to talk about.
I'm terrified about saying the wrong thing,
and I know my thoughts, aren't always totally consistent.
First off, I just need to say this,
which is that Black Lives Matter.
I resisted rallying behind this message
when it first came to light in the past couple years,
it was because I didn't really understand what it meant,
and I didn't understand why it was all important.
I think that many people think, by saying Black Lives Matter
it somehow implies that other lives don't matter,
or that they matter less.
And it's exactly the opposite by saying Black Lives Matter,
we are affirming that all lives matter,
including black lives.
For a very long time black lives have been treated
like they don't matter by our police, by our government,
by our leaders.
And so by saying Black Lives Matter,
we're saying we care about black people.
I used to be very involved in a hackerspace
in San Francisco, and a number of people in the hackerspace
said that we should never call the police
under any circumstance,
because they were afraid that if the police showed up
they'd be violent and that they would hurt someone.
And I really struggled with that,
I have always thought of the police has largely benevolent,
and peaceful, and I don't know, I had this notion
that if they came in, they would help defuse the situation,
and there were some scary situations in the hackerspace
because of where it was and the nature of it.
We often had people who were homeless,
or people who had mental health issues,
or people who had substance abuse issues in the space,
and often that was fine, and sometimes it wasn't,
sometimes things got really out of hand
and could get pretty scary.
It took me a long time to realize
that when people were saying,
"We're afraid that someone's gonna get hurt
"if we call the police we're afraid
"that they're gonna show up with shotguns",
which is something that happened,
that it wasn't me that needed to be afraid.
Because my experience with police,
when I say that I'm afraid of the police
what I'm afraid of is I'm afraid of getting caught speeding
and getting a ticket.
When I get pulled over for speeding,
I don't have to worry about getting shot, or beaten,
or tased, or pepper sprayed.
That's just not,
it's not something that I've ever experienced,
it's not something that a white person I know
has ever experienced.
And it's taken me a while and not until recently
that I've begun to understand that that's something
that almost every black person is afraid of
and is a very real fear and threat.
And so, I've really realized that my experience with police
is not everybody's experience.
And now as we watch the protests grow and build
across all 50 states,
we can see exactly how violent police have been,
not just to black people,
but to anybody who stands up for them.
And yet I still struggle,
I want there to be someone that I can call
when a situation gets out of control,
and when it's more than I can handle
and the people around me can handle,
and that there's, you know when there's a danger
of someone being violent.
And I was raised to believe
that the police were that person,
and now as I watch these protests unfold
and I watch them being so violent to so many people
who are peaceful and are just speaking their mind,
I began to realize and understand
that we've tasked police with too many things,
too many things that they're not trained to do,
they don't have the mindset for,
and that police departments don't have the culture for.
And when I think back to the hackerspace in San Francisco,
I think how much we wanted someone else we could call
that was trained in mental health issues,
that was trained in homeless issues,
that was trained in substance abuse issues,
that could come in and help defuse
a potentially volatile situation
in a way that we knew would be non violent,
and that would get the people that needed help
the resources that they needed.
I don't believe this is a movement
to abolish the police entirely, I believe it's a movement
to take a bunch of their plate
that they're not trained to deal with,
that they don't have the resources to deal with,
and instead give those to professionals who are.
You might be asking, why am I speaking about this now,
when I don't typically talk about political issues
in other countries that I'm in?
And this is something that I have thought a lot about
in the past few years of making Strange Parts.
In case you haven't been able to guess
I have to be really careful about what I say in videos
about other countries.
I've realized the biggest impact I can have
is to show you what other people's lives are actually like,
people that may have grown up
in completely different countries from you,
completely different cultures,
under completely different governments.
And through that my hope is, is by watching my videos
you realize that we aren't actually
that different after all.
There's so much hatred, and xenophobia,
and racism in the world, my hope is that you come away
from watching my videos with a little bit more nuance
that maybe I start to make you question
some of the stereotypes that you have about other people,
and maybe you realize they aren't actually
that different from you after all.
And if I spoke up about some of these more
controversial political topics,
I don't know that I could really say anything
that you haven't already heard from someone else.
But I would only get a chance to say it,
maybe once or twice before it wasn't welcome anymore.
And so I'm gonna keep making videos in an attempt
to bring us closer together.
I'm Scotty from Strange Parts, stay safe.
I'll see you again soon.