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Loomis man 3D prints face shields for healthcare workers

Kai Ulrich used skills and connections to bring printers into his home to add to larger printing efforts

LOOMIS, Calif. — A Loomis man is using his business skills and connections to help bring face shields to healthcare workers.

Kai Ulrich attended Sierra College thanks to a scholarship from the Placer Community Foundation.

Since then, Ulrich says he’s been working to use the skills he gained to serve his community, now because of how coronavirus has impacted our area, he’s found an unexpected way to do it.

Ulrich’s consulting business, Kai and Associates, was working with Sierra College to bring 3-D printing into its curriculum, a way he hoped to give back to the school he once attended.

But when coronavirus closed the campus, those plans came to a halt, so he found another way to give back to his community, using his 3D printing skills and printers the campus couldn’t use anymore to help create face shields.

“I have a very close connection with Sierra College because I do work with them,” Ulrich said, “I asked them if I could use their equipment at home to create these masks.”

Now, Ulrich has two printers at home where he is creating masks day and night, producing more than one hundred masks in a few short weeks.

The masks then go to “Operations Shields Up,” a group ABC10 first told you about in March, who produce masks out of Rocklin and distribute them out to local healthcare workers.

Though things didn’t go quite as planned this year, Ulrich says the rewards are far greater than he could have imagined.

“We found this to be our way of making not only something that matters but something that we can give back to the community and really help with and that just means the absolute world to us,” Ulrich said.

Ulrich says he wants to remind those who are able, to donate time or money to “Operation Shields Up”, so the organization can keep producing the face shields, and to donate to the scholarship that helped put him through school.

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