Hello everyone.
The quarantine brought by the need to contain by Covid-19 gave me some extra time to spend on my hobbies.
In this tough time, as a designer, I though that I could help a little bit drawing something useful for the community.
In many public workplaces you have to wear masks to protect yourself and the others sometimes for more than 8 hours a day.
And other than the disconfort brought with the difficulty to breath well with a mask on your mouth and nose, another issue is that the elastic cords of the mask if worn for a lot of hours continuously may cause irritation and bruises on your ears.
That’s when a good ear saver comes in help.
After searching for a good mask extender and ear saver on the web and finding nothing that would appeal me I decided to design one myself.
Is very useful to extend the surgical mask cord and other types of masks and it helps to keep your ears without bruises.
I put numbers on the holes so with a quick glance you already know where to put your mask cord without counting up the holes.
The holes are designed so they keep the cord in, so the mask extender won’t fall off.
You can shorten up the extender breaking it at the number you need.
It works great with surgical masks and ffp2 masks.
A lot of people have a 3D printer at home and so they can produce those earsavers themself.
I printed this eight ear saver batch with my Creality Ender 3 printer, using PLA filament, 0,15mm steps and 30% infill.
For 8 mask extender it took me about 2 and half hours.
One will take you about 20 minutes.
I uploaded the .stl and .step files on my account of Grabcad and Thingiverse.
You can download them here:
Here’s an example of how it works:
After I designed my standard mask extender, I started testing it, giving it to some of my friends and coworkers.
The feedback was great, the mask extender was of the right measure for most people, but some of my friends that were bigger and had a “bigger head” had trouble using the adapter because it was too short for them.
So I designed this longer version too.
You can download the XL version here:
Hope it will be useful to you! See you next time!