Hello all,
Recently I've been trying to plan for the future tool purchases I will be making for 4901 in the upcoming pre or post seasons.
Here's a little blurb on what I have space and tool wise to work with currently. 4901's build shop is a small project shop off to the side of the main University of South Carolina Engineering Machine Shop. The team gets to use a little less than 1/3 of that space for building. A space that can accommodate maybe less than 10 people working simultaneously. Other than that we have an office in the machine shop and then space for non-machining build meetings throughout the college of engineering.
On to the tools. We currently have a JET tabletop band-saw in our project shop, a small drill press, a combo 6" belt/disk sander, and an assortment of hand operated tools (all the normal stuff wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, files, etc.) (drills, impact gun, reciprocating saw, circular saw, a Dremel, and a few air tools as well).
Our main machine shop (which we have somewhat limited or no access to during normal meeting times, which could change this year) has all the goodies. By that I mean, several manual operation mills, several manual operation lathes, a large vertical band-saw, a horizontal band saw, 2 older 2.5 axis CNC mills, and 2 older CNC lathes, an arbor press, and a welding setup, a sandblasting machine (clueless to how it works), and grinding/sanding set-up. Also the CEC has a water-jet and a 3D printer in another building we could use...potentially but the turnaround time is really long, something like 2+ weeks depending on the operator's time constraints, I wish I knew/and was allowed to run the water-jet because then things would get done. So all in all if we had unlimited access to those machines and I had a mentor, or my own knowledge of how to run them all proficiently we'd be in business.
However at this point things don't look they will be changing very soon. So I was beginning a search for smaller tools to start adding to our project shop setup. For example...
this mill
https://littlemachineshop.com/products/product_view.php?ProductID=4981&category=138780768 3
building this CNC router or buying another one (with Bosch FMS instead of 80x20 (don't know how easy that would be yet.)
http://www.kronosrobotics.com/krmx02
and this lathe
https://littlemachineshop.com/products/product_view.php?ProductID=3877&category=127179930 6
The idea of buying or making the router is that I could potentially make it large enough to do our small aluminium sheet work for example; gussets, gearbox plates, gearbox mounts, etc.
I actually was turned to the idea of mini machine tools for use after seeing the smaller machine tools that Team 180 has in their pit, which we made good use of at the Orlando Regional this year before elims. I was wondering if the community had any good suggestions on machine tools that I should look at instead of the above tools and what things I should look for in terms of what NOT to buy. Say I fall into a pit with $7-8K in it what could I get with my money.