Quote:
Originally Posted by sanddrag
On the build vs. buy thing, even for top level teams, on kickoff day, we gave a serious look at the off the shelf options, and spent a couple solid hours weighing and debating it. The COTS items available this year are really good. Even though we have in-house CNC capabilities, we gave strong consideration to things like WCP gearboxes and bearing blocks, transmissions, and Vexpro ballshifters. But, in the end, by a very narrow margin, we decided to make all our own wheels, axles, gearboxes, frame, etc. There were just a few details on some of the COTS parts that we thought we could do better with custom parts, and we're saving a good bit of $$ by making things ourselves. But, we're paying the price of manufacturing time spent. It will be a couple weeks still before we have gearboxes and a frame. But, we think it will be worth it in the end.
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We are going custom frame but not gearboxes. I'd love to hear some of the things that you feel you are saving by going custom. Weight and space are the two advantages I see of going custom over something like the WCP 3 CIM dog shifters. I'd love to see plates like the one on the WCP 3 CIM single speed be offered to make this point null.
Even so, the COTS stuff can be really useful. For example, 2/3 of our "custom" gearboxes this year are using vex versaplanetaries/cim-ilies as the initial stage(the third custom gearbox is designed to fit CIMs so we still might use these two options later). This has drastically simplified the design, and given us more versatile options if we believe that our ratios are unfit later.