12/16 - 12/20
Daniel worked on the schmidtt airpods case. We messed it up cuz we don't know how to lock the vector table down. For this we are stupid. However, she was ok with us being stupid and told us to make a mountain on the other side. Andrew was very mad, but this is ok. Because he is a perfectionist.
Also Space worms! We talked to Sean from Bioscience about our idea to put nematodes into the upper atmosphere with a high altitude balloon. I started studying for the ARRL Technician class HAM radio license so we can put these worm boys into space. I need this so I can "operate" the APRS Transponder onboard the HAB payload that will allow us to communicate with the APRS network up to 100,000 feet. We tryna write a proposal now so that Li will say yes to the idea.
12/8 - 12/14
We had to do a house joust which was to make trophies. There wasn't enough money in them, so our entire house did not want to do. Thomas made a design just so we could get points for the job. Also a bioscience kid came up to us and asked to make a trophy or something so we went up to anderson and asked her about it. We got a job to make a plaque. We made numerous designs all of which weren't the best. In the wake of rejecting those and totally upgrading we go to an accord with this plan. After endorsement from the client we made a model while different individuals from the house made the wooden base.
12/2 - 12/6
Shirt were a thing that we were supposed to do before but we were bad. Alright so essentially what occured on this week was we completed the fabrication of the cool blue t shirts for the association of middle school filmore asb. Alright so essentially, with an aggregate of 19 (one-nine) shirts, so then we continued forward to the larges. On Tuesday after we finished the mediums, we finished around 4 larges by then expected to clean up. I tackled the game plan and the work procedure capability. On different events, I expected to get social orders attentiveness with respect to wrap up the action yet else it was extremely fast. That day we handled that position passed on.
11/25 - 11/26
Two day week, but productive. We're working on these shirts, something kind of therapeutic and relaxing about just doing this repetitive task over and over and over again. Kind of fun I guess. Daniel got a job doing something regarding laser engraving and airpods, not really sure whats up with that but he'll get it done cuz hes epic. Guess I should know since I'm the leader or something. Two day week, not sure what else I can write about. Pic is from Daniel's blog, its the design he came up with for Schmidt's air pods case.
11/18 - 11/22
Kind of a slow week. We are working (but at a pretty slow pace) on this bioscience plaque for Anderson's class. She didn't seem to care that it was taking a long time so I guess we'll drag it out cuz it gives people stuff to do. I'm getting this resurgence of a feeling I had at the beginning of the school year, a feeling of boredom and not looking forward to class due to just doing this weird dance of getting people to do something while making sure everyone's getting stuff done. I hate taking on new jobs because I tend to see all of them as pity jobs, and I'm not sure if I'm being arrogant but I feel like a lot of the stuff we do is simply just not exciting enough. I know the people in my house, we are all good friends, and I know that they are capable of much much more. I need to figure out how to leverage this to make cool stuff happen, but for now, we're just going through the motions. Kaden got us a job making shirts so I guess we're making shirts for a middle school now.
11/11 - 11/15
This week was pretty sick, we delivered the cold war trophies that Daniel had been hard at work on for the last few weeks to Mrs. Adams. This felt really good to get the relatively large and spooky job out of our minds, especially since the laser had failed us due to not being maintained and cleaned regularly, which I helped to start doing, as well as the infamous zero bug that causes the zero of the laser to slip between operations. In our case, the zero slipped when going from raster to vector mode, causing the vector cut to be offset from the rasterized design by approximately 1 1/2" diagonally. This rendered a whole row (1/3) of our trophies to be sliced in half and caused the cost of the job to go up. Luckily, due to our expert negotiation skills (we told her a high price and she just agreed to it), we had a profit margin of about 266% on every trophy so we were able to cover for the slip pretty well. Also started grinding on wooden doorstops (as lame as it sounds in big picture) this could really be our thing.
11/4 - 11/8
Made the decision to pull the plug on this whole reeves trophy thing. While I don't mind going through the process of making the sign and whatnot, he was pretty rude to me, nate, and thomas when we went up to talk to him. He started out by flat-out cancelling the job because the runner kids didn't meet some sort of fundraising quota for his "spinathon". Thought this was pretty uncool of him to drag his teams stuff into our job, and he later offered to work with me on the trophy provided I don't come back with Nate or Thomas but at this point, we had wasted so much time on this job with very little profit (because we would have to bring our price down as a result of the whole spinathon thing), that it didn't really make sense to do it. Started work on making the trophies for Adams because Daniel is kind of a god.
10/21 - 10/25
Figured out the issue with the laser. I spent about an hour with it, tensioning the x-axis belt and cleaning the dust out of the bearings and off the rails. Also pulled all the optics out of the little carriage and cleaned BOTH sides. I don't think people were ever getting to the insides of the lens, just wiping the optics from the outside. There was a bunch of accumulated dust just sitting inside the lens (so much I could turn it over and dump it out). After thoroughly cleaning the x-axis rails, carriage, and it's optics, I put it back together and ran a few checkerboard tests, works much better. Daniel can make trophies now. Also Andrew did the whole stamp and basketball design thing for Li and Liam is making a plywood box for an unwise junior who wanted to pay us 65 bucks for a plywood enclosure. Profit is profit...
10/14 - 10/17
We are trying to get Daniels Trophy job to work but the laser doesn't seem to like it. The other houses are having okay results with the laser, but our trophies are coming out pretty bad. I need to look into this with Daniel, I suspect it has something to do with his design but I am not sure. Also got Ken Reeves to sign off on a trophy job for 45 bucks. He seems not as scary as the runners make him out to be :P.
10/7 - 10/11
Early on in the school year, Mrs. Adams approached us to make her Cold War Project Trophy. She also wanted to "inspire some capitalism" so she gave the same job to Sail and Sage. I made a pact with Josiah from Sail to leave the trophies for us if we leave the VC Pol Sci lanyard job to his house and we got to work with designs. The guys at Sail are probably our closest partners due to our similar interests and shared pool of friends. We hope to collaborate with them more extensively in the future. Also got Kaden into our house who is a pro at the machines and has time to run some jobs during his TA period. He immediately got 2 jobs for us, some coasters and t-shirts for Fillmore Middle School's ASB.
9/29-10/5
While personally I don't think our startup is mature enough to start taking on jobs, a few of the boys are getting a bit antsy for jobs so Thomas went on a job spree and got a bunch of jobs around campus. Personally I don't think these jobs are at all helpful to DTech, these are in essence pity jobs. One example is the not one but two teachers wanting us to make them a box to put rulers in to replace their current bins. Pity Jobs are not profitable and are demoralizing to the students of DTech, however I acknowledge we only have two semesters to run this company so we should start pumping stuff out soon if we are ever to get enough cash to tackle the bigger projects we all dream about. Until then, doorstops.
9/23-9/27
Ethan has taken it onto himself to ensure that we have a killer house plaque. We worked together to cut and sand the roughly shaped (and apparently incredibly expensive) wood into three panels that were attached to a backing plate. Liam showed us how to operate the X-Carve to engrave the names. In doing so I noticed the bearing bolts on the x-carve z-axis are trashed, probably as the result of someone crashing the mill. We need to replace these. Also worked with the Nomad 883 Desktop CNC. This thing is incredible and very underutilized in the DTech lab, one of my friends was telling me they use this cnc to machine aluminum injector nozzles for hybrid rocket motors at college. I replaced the control board and hopefully this thing fires up soon because while I don't have any jobs in mind, it will be an awesome thing to have working for the lab.
9/16-9/20
While I love the challenge that DTech provides me, I find myself realizing that I am not putting the skills of myself and my team mates to their full potential. Whilst making t-shirts and lanyards is good and all, I believe we are capable of so much more than these trivial products. This is where I hope to take my house, and while I realize it is a harder path to take with fewer jobs, I hold that there is potential that if unlocked, will allow our house to do truly remarkable things that can push the envelope of what high-schoolers can be expected to achieve, far greater than the challenges imposed on us by t-shirts or trophies.
9/9-9/13
This week, our team focused it's efforts on making t-shirts, having established solid logos and color pallets the week prior. This last weekend, team members met to attempt to place our logo on the silk screen molds we had cleaned earlier. This was very difficult and did not produce many satisfactory results, however we got one small logo that was still usable. Using this screens to create our logo was a much simpler process, however we thought that the heating pad was a a heat press and burned two of our test shirts. The rest of the shirts went without much conflict.