Rosscarbery company sealing safety for frontliners

A WEST Cork company has gone from making wax seals to making adjustable face shields for frontline workers battling Covid-19.

Diane Wisdom and James Healy, who run Heirloom Seals in Rosscarbery,  only  starting making the masks last week and are hoping to scale up production shortly. Diana said that their business has been impacted by Covid-19 and because their machines were getting quieter they really wanted to do something to help people working on the frontline.

‘We’ve been researching for the past three or four weeks really to see how we could put our machines to use to make these face shields,’ said Diane.

‘We are using a design made available by a UK firm Kitronik and they supply the material as well. As soon we were able to figure out the right settings for the machines we were able to start and create laser-cut PPE shields which are now available free of charge to our brave frontline workers.’ The couple have already received a number of orders from West Cork and from Dublin. They have also self-financed the production of the first 1,500 face shields and have set up a GoFundMe page to source additional materials to allow them continue.

‘Each shield only costs 50c in materials and even a small donation of €5 would result in a significant donations of 10 face shields to those in need.’

She said that if people are stuck for face shields then they can order them on their website and there is an initial limit of 30 shields per person until production scales up.

‘People can collect them from our home studio here in Rosscarbery free of charge or we can ship them for by express mail for €6.’

To order face shields  see www.heirloomseals.com/faceshields  and if you would like to donate go to www.heirloomseals.com/donate.