PROJECT: GET-A-GRIP
COVID-19 lives on doorhandles for nine days. Not anymore.
A key factor in the health crisis which has emerged over the last few months has been the ease with which the virus has spread. It is able to survive on any surface it is passed onto for days at a time, sometimes even longer than a week. When this surface is one touched hundreds or thousands of times every day, such as in shops and offices, it becomes a huge source of concern.
Businesses and customers across the world are anxious to return to some degree of normalcy but only when it is safe to do so. Metal door handles in factories, gyms, hotels and other industries will be touched thousands of times a day by a multitude of people and are a major source of risk. To help businesses get back on track, we created Project Get-a-grip to offer an easy applicator for doorhandles. Printed using an antimicrobial material, it would provide a hostile environment for the virus, drastically reducing the length of time it can survive. Reducing the length of time the virus exists on a surface will reduce the number of people who can potentially come into contact with it, making businesses and places of work safer by stopping the spread of the virus.
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3D printing offered two key advantages to this project. Initially, rapid prototyping was essential to determining the proper shape, thickness and flexibility required in the material and design. With the news on the health crisis and economy getting worse every day, reducing to a minimum the time this process took was essential. Secondly, door handles are not all made to the same design, different shapes and sizes abound, so being able to adapt the grips to individual use cases and businesses is essential. Using Additive Manufacturing is key to ensuring no business is left behind.
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Some of the best parts of projects are adversity inspiring innovation and when we discover unexpected applications. This is exactly what happened when we had a delivery go wrong. When the wrong material arrived, it got us thinking we could print the door grips using two different materials: a low-cost PETG on the inside and a thin, swappable layer of antimicrobial TPU on the outside. Combining the two materials together reduced the cost, which we could pass on, and the swappable element allowed for buyers to provide maximum protection for customers by quarantining the part touched by users and alternating it with a different one.
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Then, it was discovered the door grip turned out to be equally perfect for gym dumbbells. In much the same way as they fit on a door handle, the product clips neatly onto the metal handle of a dumbbell, providing extra reassurance to customers apprehensively returning to gyms and leisure centres around the country. We are on the lookout for even more applications for this project in the future!