One week out, ready for the postmortem.
First - some thanks:
- to @TomKeddie for re-designing the kits, and ordering parts.
- to @Janet for creating the instructions and co-ordinating loans of lamps.
- to @Shane for working the booth the entire damn weekend.
- to @RedCardOP for taking a hit in the line of duty, and still working most of the weekend.
- to all those others who came out and did a shift on the soldering booth - thank you. We couldn’t have done it without you.
Rough numbers - we did just over 200 kits, split pretty evenly across the two days.
5 burns, AFAIK, none particularly severe.
I don’t know final numbers money wise, as I don’t know all the costs.
We ran 10 participant stations
Throughout most of the weekend, we had around 4 volunteers at the booth. 4 volunteers to 10 stations worked pretty well.
We brought 13 of VHS stations - the Hakkos, Wellers, and Clones. Having a couple spare worked well - when the tips dies on participant ones, we could swap them out and keep going while the station cooled down to have its tip replaced.
The participants where setup in a “C” around the middle space - with a few benches against the wall where we made up kits and had a “repair station”
I think that the repair station worked quite well - we had the VHS hot air pencil, which greatly simplified removing components, my personal station - more powerful than the VHS ones, which let us quickly reflow things and use braid. Tweezers and a panavise let us quickly pull transistors with the hot air pencil. (number one participant error was backwards transistors). I’d suggest bringing the hot air in future years, and if possible, a more powerful iron.
We had a waitlist for essentially the entire weekend. Throughput was certainly limited by available stations and volunteers. Time to complete the kit was generally in the 30-40 minute range, but with a high variance - if we had to remove transistors for them, etc.
I’ll echo @SteveRoy’s comment that more volunteers would have been appreciated.
I was also severely disappointed that several individuals who had volunteered didn’t show up at all for the weekend, and never dropped us a line, or made any other contact. I won’t callout specific names.
On the volunteer front, while I greatly appreciate @TyIsI’s work on the volunteer co-ordination, I think it would make things smoother in future years to have whoever’s co-ordinating the booth take this on, as well - it was difficult to know who should be where, and I’d suggest having it in one hat in the future.
The kit and instruction design worked quite well, on the whole - just a few minor tweaks for the next revision.
As mentioned, the number one participant mistake was putting the transistors backwards. the other really common reason for “why doesn’t it work” was just cold solder joints - reflowing the joints quickly with the repair station managed to fix a lot of boards.
One frustration was kids dumped at our booth - this was usually the children of other makers. In future years, I would be more aggressive about tracking them down - we had one kid spend 90 minutes, as he didn’t really want to do it, and would stop after every component. It tied up a spot for an unreasonable length of time.
I neglected to bring a big “VANCOUVER HACKSPACE” banner. We could easily have hung one, and it’s something I’d definitely fix for next year. I’d also suggest having business cards/stickers at the soldering booth - we had a number of people ask. There was also a number of teachers inquire about buying class sets of the kits, and one or two groups (ex. Scouts) inquiring if we come out and run workshops for them. It would be nice if we could have the booths nearer each other, in order to point people to where they can get more information.
I was also asked a number of times for advice on purchasing a soldering iron. I might writeup a one page “Buying a Soldering Iron” guide, in the future. (bonus points if it has referal links that benefit the space…)
Something we learned after the first day was that letting our chairs get “borrowed” by parents helping children at stations meant we wouldn’t get it back. We where much harder about this sunday, and it saved our feet. I’d suggest more chairs in future years - ideally 3/4 for every two stations on the participant side, and number of volunteers + 2 chairs in the back.
Having a planned “next step” workshop building a more complex project at VHS scheduled for a couple weeks after and taking signups at maker faire would likely do well for bringing people in to the space.
Thanks again to all who made the weekend a success.
