Denso shifts plastics molding from instrument clusters to shields

"Thank you for taking care of us."

That's what a team of Denso Corp. employees in suburban Knoxville, Tenn., printed on the first face shields it made for hospital workers during the COVID-19 crisis.

With the guidance of front-line nurses at Blount Memorial Hospital, the Denso team developed, produced and delivered several thousand face shields.

Led by Britt Autry, Denso vice president of manufacturing, an initial team of 15 employees at the Japanese supplier's Maryville, Tenn., plant quickly got together during the weekend of March 20 to pivot from manufacturing auto parts to personal protective equipment.

After sketching a face shield design, which incorporated materials and tools the plant already had on hand, the team 3D printed its first prototype shield. The team tried a number of variations in the following days.

"We went through about five or six modifications with the 3D printer that week," Autry said.

The team's final mask design had some unique features to help stop the spread of the virus.

"We designed the shield to wrap around the ears, and that was something that no other shield would do — they would cover the face, but the ears were left open," Autry said.

After the modifications, the team gathered the campus's 3D printers and began churning out 50 shields per day. Along with the thank you message, the team printed its logo on the shields.

But they knew demand was much greater than what they were producing via 3D printing, so Autry mobilized the team to switch to an injection molding process.

Using polycarbonate typically use in instrument clusters, Denso Maryville employees voluntarily came in over the Easter holiday weekend to ramp up mass production of the shields. About 400 workers geared up across three shifts with two lines to produce more than 3,000 shields per day.

A total of 60,000 shields have been supplied to hospitals in several states and Mexico as a result of the effort.

"We didn't think about cost when we were doing it; we were just thinking about how to use our resources to support the needs in our community," Autry said. "That really, I felt, gave us a lot of motivation to move quickly."

Maryville workers have kept the lines ready for a resurgence of cases and have started supplying for the regional school district.

Looking back on the success of the project, Autry said the team thinks about "how could we do something so quickly, and how can we collaborate more in our daily job and do normal things with that fervor and that speed?"