I'll take a crack at it this one:
Linking you to our bots:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/38030 (Not built by an army of mentors or anything)
Not Very Successful:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/20464
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/photos/27094
You can read through the specs there and see the progression that your team could go through. We have a group of lets say 25 kids on a good day and more or less a group of 10-15 on average with about 2-3 local mentors & 2-3 remote mentors.
We currently CAD about 90-95% (I wish we could finish the entire thing) of our robot. Our team directly benefited from
Adam's advice above. We had zero machine shop sponsors in 2008 and never cad'd a single part. We took some extrusion, t-slot, whatever else we could fine and built a robot. While it was fun and everyone seemed involved, the robot was never great and the team was meh at best (4-5 kids showed up on average, we showed up when we felt like and built whatever we wanted).
As we got more serious:
-We started to CAD every part (minus wiring/pneumatic lines)
-Called up every shop in town(literally and 3/4 of the town shops sponsor us and some in various other towns)
-Kids started to show up and involvement got even higher.
Our goal is to:
-Be the best we can
-Teach kids how to use CAD/CNC's/Welding/Wiring/etc... We want them to learn as many skills as possible.
-Be a competitive team
-Teach our kids how to win at everything they do. <- Very important to me
-And one day to get onto Einstein.
Your issue:
-Don't feel CAD is important and/or think it will make it so the mechanical kids are less involved.
-Shouldn't be the cenerpoint?
-Why send off parts to a sponsor?
What we/Other teams do:
-Using CAD has helped us get
more kids involved and save a ton of money/time.
-We use the CAD model in a way so everyone can put their two cents in, its hard for a kid to come up to a person in charge while the robot is being built and go "Change the ENTIRE design" or "Change this piece". When its in a harmless model, its much much much easier to do so. We encourage each kid to help us with design. Some of the best parts of our robot (imo), a sophomore/junior thought of it. Not a mentor or some genius.
-CAD allows you play with multiple ideas and check if everything is going to work.
-When we finish conceptual design (paper/whiteboard etc..). We have the kids that are not CAD'n, our hands on lets get building people work on:
--Actual Field Elements
--Prototypes: We made an actual wood 4Bar and working shooter
--Intake Concepts
--Crossing the barrier mods
--Testing ball jams
-Then we regroup during the week off an on and have people put their two cents in and get moving towards a finished product.
Sponsors:
-We send off 10-20 percent of our robot out in terms of making parts. Why? There is nothing wrong with sending our more or less btw.
-We feel we are getting more (outside) people involved with our program.
-Some parts are impossible for us to make, 27x37 belly pan will not fit on our 20x30 router no matter how hard we try! Large laser parts with bends we send out as well as we can't bend accurately.
-Repetition, our machines are not top of the line. If we are making 50 bearing blocks, a sponsor would have no problem doing them. We send out a lot of the parts that a sponsor can set up once or twice and run a ton of that part for us.
-This process has not only helped kids not get burnt out while making parts but has also gotten us higher community involvement and awareness.
TL;DR. Change is hard. CAD is important. Sponsors are money and I'm glad we have 20+ shops and 100+ donors. If you don't want them, its your loss (We had 10 donors and zero shops in 2008). And most of all there are plenty of jobs/stuff that needs to be done. Just gotta look a little harder and try a little harder. Adam's advice above is seriously awesome, we have DIRECTLY benefited.
-RC