Tessy Plastics Initiates Face Shield Manufacturing to Help Combat Covid-19

Tessy Plastics Corp. (Skaneateles) worked quickly to develop the face shields, which are comprised of a three-piece assembly—headband, visor and shield. Josh Canfield, director of sales at Tessy told Plastics Technology that the clear shield component is a .015-in-thick antifog APET material that is die cut by Dynamic Pak Thermoforming (Syracuse, N.Y.). The visor component is molded from a polypropylene copolymer. Single-cavity tooling was created by Tool-All and Tessy Tooling, both in Erie, Penn., while Protolabs helped shorten lead time on the molds.

Initially, Tessy 3D printed a prototype and modified the design for injection molding, functionality and comfort. The project grew out of a collaboration between Tessy’s Brian Anderson and Syracuse University, of which Anderson is an alumni. Anderson worked together with Syracuse professor, James Fathers, who is also the director of the university’s school of design. 

Production started last week and will be ramping up this week, according to Canfield. The shield was engineered to minimize facial exposure, while still being a one-size-fits design that can be sanitized for medical use. Tessy says each face shield will be shipped as a separate component for quick assembly in the field. This approach also allowed the company to reduce its time to market and increase the volume as needed. 

Onondaga County has made an initial order of 30,000. In a March 31 press briefing, Onondaga County Executive Ryan McMahon praised Tessy’s participation. “PPE supply is going to be an ongoing issue and to work with a world-class company like Tessy to make products we need immediately is really important. I want to thank the Beck family and certainly our Tessy family overall for their partnership. We are happy to be their first order, and it’s PPE that is sorely needed.”

Canfield told Plastics Technology that his company has created a Covid-19 task force which meets every morning to go over the status of various projects related to dealing with the pandemic, including various medical products that company manufacturers. “Our main focus is to keep current customer base in production,” Canfield says, “and then use whatever bandwidth we have left do what we can to help.”