Okay, I’m sure something similar has come up somewhere but I must not be searching the right thing.
The short of it is I need to make A LOT of long FLEXIBLE ear savers. I’m running some ideas past my brain trust and it occurs to me to wonder- I know some of you make rubber stamps with your machines. Would that in theory work? The elastic has very, very little give on these.
The long - my husband works for a very people heavy place and handles things like their safety regulations. They’re opening up back again soon. Their long time trusted vendor sent them masks… that are just hilariously small. I wear a child’s sized mask and they are small on me. The ear elastic bends his ears forward and barely goes past mine. They asked the vendor what they can do about it and they sent them a picture of GF made ear savers LOL and said they can ship them but can’t modify them.
Fortunately my husband has me. He’d heard the masks were small and had me whip up a batch before going into the meeting. They all shared a laugh about it being the same ear savers but now the question comes- can I do better somehow?
Using a heat gun or whatever to melt them one at a time into a rounded shape won’t be working. I have to make far too many for that and I’d still have to make the saver itself hella long.
Use thinner acrylic. I found that 0.060 (1/16") was very good. Flexible but strong. Folks are also using 0.030 (1/32") as well - even thinner & more flexible.
BF Plastics, estreetplastics and even Graingers carries it.
I’m probably going to be making like 300+ I’m not sure. Are you sure about the thinner acrylic? Won’t it just shatter when it bends around the head? These masks are so small it would have to bend almost from ear to ear and again I refuse to do the heat gun thing for that many. XD
they’re very thin polycarbonate. they tend to cut dirty (polycarbonate does), so i’m wiping down my machine after each set of six mats. but it’s really flexible, cuts pretty quickly, and inexpensive.
I’ll send some regular ones and take a shot at some longer ones (GF has cleared my machine for use so long as I update them with any more fails).
9 3/4 is really long - the standard earsaver is only 3 7/8". 9 3/4 is about the distance between my ears. Do the elastics on the masks not stretch any past the ears?
That bend is nice! Also yeah these masks… the elastic is just… it’s painfully short… I don’t know what they were thinking. If I managed to get my hand in the ear hole it would barely stretch around my wrist.
I made mine out of 1/16". It’s definitely much more flexible. They WILL snap (mine are a thinner design and they would have snapped at that curve radius above), so the length may end up being important. That said, I think it’s a much better material for comfort than 1/8".
i will just reiterate: it doesn’t burn cleanly. you’ll have a lot of white dust in your machine and will need to clean more often. i’ve actually got some masking on the inside of the door because it just coats that area and when i finally stop, i can just peel it off instead of having to clean that area. and you’ll need to wipe the earsavers when they come out. i drop a sheet at a time in a small container of windex, shake it up, and wipe them down when they come out. it’s not too bad, and since i’m cutting a sheet of 50 in 8ish mins (305/full), it’s still a little faster overall. but you do have some work to do.
but i still like them better despite my above warning.
I was making “flexis” from the scraps of the earsavers, but you could make the entire sheet of the half earsavers and tie those together at any distance. Here are some I tied close but the could be tied with any ribbon or line to fit each person,
I did 10,000 of them & shipped them all over the country for free. One more box is no biggie.
