Kevin Pena

This week we finished the Soldier Project Best Actor awards which turned out pretty well. After we made these we made the stands for the awards which fit perfectly. However we didn't add any finish to it so it might not be as good as we wanted it to be. With the finish it could have looked better and may have been not as rough around the edges. We didn't have enough time to do the rest of the awards, like the best picture awards but we are hoping to do them next week with hopefully enough time to do them all since other groups need the laser cutter as well.

This week we finished the rest of the awards, which turned out pretty well. One problem that we had when we started was that the laser's lens began to get dirty which caused it to become unfocused so we had to clean it before continuing. It only messed up two of them so we only had to redo them after the lens was clean. Then we did the stands in the same acrylic which also came out nicely. But we did have one problem with the stands, they didn't fit perfectly like the ones for the Best Actor awards. We decided to super glue the awards and stands which worked pretty well.

We finished another job this week which was making some picks for a customer. Once they were done after the laser they came out pretty much like triangles, with sort of round edges, so we had to sand the sides down until they were more round. We also sanded down the sides so that they didn't seem too thick. Afterwords we added some mineral oil so that they looked better and felt better on the hand. All in all they came out pretty well but probably next time we should get thinner would so that they didn't start of so thick.

We decided to try something differently this week. We wanted to try and create a card holder or some sort of wallet in Onshape so that we could use the 3D Printer. At first we wanted didn't know how the cards would stay in the holder. Then we decided on doing some sort of clip but that didn't work out too well. We were still trying to remember everything on Onshape but then decided to add a sort of cap on the top so that it would hold the cards in. It's not finished yet but we are hoping that we can finish it soon.

I was able to get a job from my coworker who asked for three shirts that had Thing 1, Thing 2, and Thing 3. She wanted these shirts in blue with black text which isn't too hard to do, all we really had to do is wait for the shirts and make the design. For the design we chose something and tweaked it so that I was just the text and the circle around it. We are waiting for the shirts to come in so that we can heat press. Since the text isn't too complicated the text should be able to come off easily once we start cutting it.

We cut out the designs for the shirts. These turned out pretty well and weren't hard to weed out at all. Since it's such a simple design and doesn't have any sharp edges or points we don't have to really worn that it will peel off any time soon once it goes through the wash when it's on the shirt. Then again we still have to worry that it will peel when it goes through the wash. We'll probably heat press it twice so that it will stay on longer. For now though we still have to wait for the shirts to come in.

During the start of this entrepreneurship experience I had completed all of my safety tests which allows me to use machines that we have in the DTech Lab. After this will be the start to me improving my skills in every machine that I can to create great products. My team and I then created our logo in Inkscape after a few tries, we figured out what we wanted it to look like and that it was going to be a design that we would stick with. This logo maybe be simple but it is something I feel like I could be proud of in the future.

This week my team and I created our lanyards. We use these for things like Back to School Night, as a way to spread out our company. This was our first design and we will have to make changes to it because we haven't done our team shirts. Another problem we had with the lanyard was our QR code. The site that we used gave a premium trial to us when we joined that allowed use to create the code, but now that the trial has expired we don't have access to the QR code. We'll have to find another site or way around this before we make our finalized lanyards.

This week we had finally finished printing out our first draft of our lanyards. They came out very well, with a few size issues but not too drastic that we had to reprint them. We are still thinking of changing these in the future because there are still a few errors on them. For one the QR code still doesn't work and we still have not found a way to create another one from the same site that we had used it from. As well has fixing the size so that the both sides are the same size and not one larger than the other. Other than that the design of the lanyard came out well but we will make it better once we get our shirts and are able to fix everything.

This was a short week for us so but we still got a lot of things done. For one we were able to vinyl heat transfer our business name onto a shirt which came out pretty well by using a vinyl sticker and heat pressing for 15 seconds at 350 degrees. Hopefully it stays on for a long time and through a washing machine. Next time we will probably double heat press so that it can hopefully last longer than with one press. We were also able to get our first design proof for one of our customers and soon will have to print the lanyards that we had created for him.

Part of what we completed as a team for this week is raster engraving our logo onto a piece of acrylic. After that we are going put a light piece of wood behind it with a LED strip so that it will really stand out between the rest of the logos on display. We also were able to set up our template of lanyards for our first sale which we hare hoping to complete by next week. We have another sale that we are hoping to finish around next week or the week after, after we figure out what get the vinyl sheets for the stickers.

This week our house has completed our first order for the Political Science Club at Ventura College. However our customer got sick and cannot pick up his order so we'll just have to wait until he is ready. At the moment we sadly don't have another job. Our other job that we have is pretty much finished as well. We might however make our team shirts and redo our lanyards so that we have something to use if we ever go anywhere and we need to represent DTech and our team. We are very excited to finish this first job and get our next.

This week we had some more issues with completing our job because the email that we were given for both the customer and the billing address were both wrong. We had to contact the customer to ask if we could get the correct email. I fixed our Trello cards to the format that Li wanted us to have. This makes it easy for us as well since we can see what information we have and what information we need. It also lets us know how far we are in the project and what the next step is. Right now however we don't have any jobs incoming so that's

This week my team and I were able to finish producing our stickers for our second order. We then went on to weeding out the parts we didn't need and putting on the transfer paper onto them. We had some issues when we were weeding them out, but for me the biggest problem that I had was getting the letters out. Since the font we used made the letters so thin it was hard to remove the unneeded parts without removing the letters as well. Some parts as well like the i and one of the t's weren't cut all the way so I had to make some cuts into them to be able to take them out better.

We were able to finish our job today and now all we have to do is deliver them to our customer and put them on. We had a few struggles during this job but we were able to fix what the problems were. It was a good learning experience using the vinyl cutter and weeding out stickers. One thing I can say is that next time we should use a font that doesn't separate the i and the dot above because weeding it out is very difficult and can sometimes be lost when we cut the stickers out. Another thing I was able to do this week was learn how to use the silk screen. It was a very interesting but easy process. However it will take a little time to be able to perfectly use it without any issues or errors.

This week we put our logo onto a screen printing mesh. I didn't fully get to see the full process, which I really wish I did but I'll be able to see the full process if we ever need to make a lot of shirts for a job. Our next task is to create a trophy design for a "House Joust", which is a competition between all of the teams in our class to just see who does the best or to win a job. This will be very interesting because this is the first competition between teams this year for a pretty big job.

This week we only had one day to do anything before we started our Thanksgiving break. We started putting the stickers onto the Chromebooks for our job. However, once we began placing the stickers onto the Chromebook with the transfer tape, the sticker wouldn't come off of the transfer tape. We were thinking that it was because we left the sticker on the paper for almost a week that it started to stay on the tape, but that wouldn't really make sense. We then set our problem of the surface of the Chromebook which could make the stickers not really stick to it without any other support like regular tape.

This week we were able to finish putting on the stickers for our job. We can now move onto our next job which is the same thing, putting stickers on a Chromebook. This time we know to put on the stickers on right after we put them onto the transfer paper. Our customer really liked the stickers that we did previously on our job. She gave us the design she wanted and we began testing the design to see if it was also easy to weed out. After that we then need to start making the stickers and placing them on the Chromebooks.

This week we had lessons on financial literacy. They we pretty useful in understanding how to appeal to our customers with things like ads or on our website. How to spend money in general and tactics than companies use to make people spend more money on the products they have. We are now thinking of using some of these on our social media to get some more jobs that aren't teachers at our school. Hopefully we can branch out and not only in our school. Other than that we didn't have too much else since we didn't have the usual time we normally have to work on our jobs.

This week before our Winter Break we were able finish one more job. We decided to do stickers again and make sure to only put on the stickers once the delivery date was set. We didn't want the transfer paper to be on for too long so that the stickers wouldn't be messed up. We were able to the stickers on a lot faster than the previous ones that we had done before since we put the stickers on the transfer paper right before we placed them onto the Chromebooks. Now all that's left is to wait for the payment. We luckily didn't have anymore difficulties with stickers since now we fully know how to do them.

This week we finally finished our House plaque. This turned out pretty good since we did acrylic on wood. We engraved the names of all of team members onto it which also turned out pretty good after a few failures with it were the names would either be not aligned or not centered at all when we began engraving it. We spent quite a bit of time trying to fix what the problem was but we got it in the end by just remaking the document. We didn't know exactly what we wanted to do when putting the wood and acrylic together. We just decided to screw it in but it ended up getting cracked a little but not enough to be noticed from far away.