3D printing seems crazy for a single sheet of bendy plastic that needs to be mass produced. Cutting them out by hand with a knife or a scissors would be better than 3d printing, never mind laser or die cutting.
The printed part was the forehead-piece that the bendy plastic is mounted to.
I'm not sure what the person above is talking about. I haven't seen a single face shield design involving a 3d printed piece that didn't also require a sheet of bendy plastic cut to fit with that 3d printed piece.
I was laser cutting the clear parts of the shields with a local makerspace. We ran out of the thicker material that was being used, now there is a worldwide shortage. We were making for doctors and nurses in hospitals, so we wanted something more substantial. These look pretty flimsy, but are probably better than nothing. We failed to realize the supply of our material was not infinite. We actually had a fair number of people 3D printing, but that was still a major bottleneck.
The entire shield is a clear plastic film. It’s held against the forehead using a fabric strap. The shield appears to be either die cut or laser cut, which explains the production speed. A lot of the face shields shown online are 3D printed with hard plastic components, which is a very slow process.
The material looks a lot like the clear plastic film that wraps an iPhone or even an iPad charger. The shield folds together in the same origami-like way. Based on comments about the supply chain being involved, it seems like they leveraged the existing manufacturing process for Apple product packaging and thickened the plastic.