We indulged in a fair amount of prototyping to prevent issues during production. We want to share what we learned if only to help other makers expedite their fabrication.

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• Cast acrylic is not consistent in regard to thickness - we saw sheets from the same manufacturer vary as much as .03". Considering this, we eased our fit tolerances to better accommodate these discrepancies.

• The cast acrylic we used cut cleaner and with a more polished edge when we left the peel coat on the bottom. We removed the peel coat on the top of all the sheets as we were getting burn marks and poor engraving results.

• We initially nested all the 1/8” parts together including hundreds of clips in the waste spaces. Of course, after one run we realized how inefficient removing the peel coat was from each clip. Our solution was to run two programs on the 1/8” sheets – program one cut and engraved the brims with the bottom peel coat remaining, while program two cut the clips out once ALL the peel coat was removed – game changer.

• Occasionally an assembly of parts resulted in clips being too tight or too lose – this was rare, but happened enough that we decided to run a few programs cutting other clip sizes. We placed all the clips in zip-lock bags with their girth clearly labeled.

• Our initial design required gluing parts together like many other DIY designs, however we quickly realized this was not feasible with only one assembler. The results were inconsistent and looked messy, while the increased handling was also a concern. We scrapped the design and decided on a fastener system instead.

• Cast acrylic is brittle by nature and our first prototypes were prone to snapping at weak intersections, it was a balancing act keeping the weight down but maintaining structural integrity.

• We initially wanted to use a standard 3-hole design for the attachment points to allow for DIY hole punch remedies when shields ran out, but after multiple attempts we agreed that the 4-hole version simply provided better form and security.