The novel coronavirus pandemic has stretched many of the supply chains that keep our hospitals and other health professionals furnished with vital supplies of personal protective equipment and hand sanitiser.

But around the country, help is coming from unlikely sources.

Chris Preen, a local engineering business owner and 3D printing supplier, is more at home making components for go karts, but for the past two weeks he has turned his full 3D printing capacity over to making face shields and ear savers which are being snapped up all over the country.

“I've sent them to every state in Australia and yesterday we sent our first shipment to New Zealand,” said Chris, who had begun tinkering with a few face shield and ear saver designs after seeing how makers in other countries were able to help meet the demand during this crisis.

“I'd just been playing around a little bit with having a look at what people had designed on the internet — what you call 'open source' which means the design is offered for anyone to use or change as they see fit, there was no point reinventing the wheel so I just picked the ones that I felt were the best design and used them.”

Chris was approached locally about the possibility of producing ear savers and then the orders grew.

“I asked if they needed face shields and handed them out for people to trial and then put a couple of posts on Facebook on the ‘Buy from the Bush’ group and it just went crazy!” said Chris.

 “The demand for it was huge. It’s mostly to dentist surgeries and chiropractors and optometrists — people in the medical industries, but who are not a GP or work at a hospital but they are still working with people and that’s where a large percentage this stuff is going.”

The frame for the face shields takes about 40 minutes to print and Chris has five machines running nearly 24 hours a day.

“We had quite a backlog last week, but at the moment we are keeping up as the orders come in and getting them out the next day.”

With supermarkets and pharmacies barely able to keep hand sanitiser on the shelves, two local distilleries have switched from making quality gins and whisky to the much sought-after hand hygiene product.

“We were approached by some bigger companies to make some for them, we have the ability to do it with the licensing that we have available to us and we are one of the few companies in Australia that can do it I guess, not everyone deals with the stuff that you have to have to make hand sanitiser,” said Ben Cochran of Parrot Distilling Co.

Not that it was a product he ever envisaged they would be producing when he founded the distillery two years ago.

“No, not at all! But as the virus started to take its toll around the world, we started to realise what went into hand sanitiser and the machines you need to make it and it sort of fell into our repertoire of what we can put out,” said Ben.

“The demand has been pretty good and a lot of people seem to be very happy to support local, to support us, which is great in times like this.”

 Spring Hill’s family-run Jones & Smith Distillery also began producing hand sanitiser after they too were approached by a number of local businesses.

“We had local people call asking if we were doing it, or if we could do it, and then the NSW Government were contacting a few distilleries and asking if we could help out,” said Kylie Smith.

“Everyone knew there was a shortage and nowhere to turn to…we weren't initially going to do it, but after we had quite a lot of interest, we thought it is something that people are needing at the moment.

“It took quite a bit of effort to get it all together — the ingredients and packaging and equipment that we needed — then everything arrived, and we had everything in place ready to. We put it up online and we've been really overwhelmed!”