Manufacturer answers Government call for PPE Supplies
29 June 2020
Switching production to vital PPE was the right thing to do
EPS are experts in the design and manufacture of magnetic actuators, circuit breakers, switchboards, and substations for the medium voltage switchgear industry. But when the Government put the call out to all UK manufactures to help in the battle against COVID-19, and switch production to vital PPE, ventilator and other medical supplies - EPS answered the call.
EPS started small but wanted to scale up production
Owner of EPS UK Ltd is Brian McKeen, he is an expert in Design and Development, with several Patents to his name. So he took on the challenge of designing the PPE. After printing the headbands for the protective face masks on their in-house 3D printer, they took the decision to upscale the production and approached Tex Plastics.
“The face mask grips we'd printed were working well and the only issue was the speed we could print them at. We had great feedback from front line NHS staff thanking us for the donations and telling us how difficult the environment was that they were working in. The 3D printing had proven the concept, but we could only make a few hundred a week. To overcome this hurdle we need to chang eth emethod of manufacturing and really needed to have the plastic part moulded. As a client of Tex Plastics they were the natural first place to turn. The challenge was, was anyone still doing tooling with most businesses in Lockdown? But Tex Plastics not only got the tooling developed, they turned it around in record time”.
Brian McKeen, EPS UK Ltd
Within 2 weeks Tooling complete and 4000 units had been collected
Understanding the desperate need and how critical the speed of turning around a project like this was, Tex Plastics pulled out all of the stops. To offset the costs incurred EPS plan to sell half of the protective face visors to enable them to donate the other half to selected Health Organisations.
It was great to be involved in a project like this, and it was really innovative of EPS to develop their own version of the protective face visors. Helping them upscale production through moulding the headband component helped everyone at Tex Plastics feel they were doing their bit in the fight against COVID-19.
Lee Barker, New Business Development Director, Tex Plastics