[kaliken]

Thanks for the great words of encouragement and advice. This upcoming year is going to be great as it will add constraints that should help streamline some of our decisions and hopefully simplify designs. It may make some things we usually took for granted a bit harder to achieve. But overall it will be a good experience for the team to go through.

We will be without a mill or lathe, but we have already moved a drill press, a vise, a chop saw, a grinder, and small vertical band saw into the new room. So with those we will have some basic machine functionality. Coupled with several hand drills and some good measurement tools we can get a lot done.

I do like the idea of a mini mill or lathe, especially the lathe. Considering how many shafts and spacers that are made on our lathe, the lathe would be the one piece of equipment I am thinking about getting a small replacement for. I would feel terrible asking for every little thing to be made by our sponsors as we typically only send out complicated parts (CNC, waterjet, and welding) to our sponsors and we machine the rest (brackets, spacers, shafts, etc). Hmm looks like I will have to look at our budget...