As was mentioned before, we were really lucky to have the support of two local professional machine shops with us this year. This is us discussing our CAD drawings with one of the machinists - Mr. Price.
We had two machine shops helping us out. We learned from them. At the beginning of the season, I had no idea what a CNC mill was, much less how a mill in general worked (I'm part of the electrical/programming side). Now I've seen them in action, and I think they're awesome tools. That's what this program is about.
Another cool thing we did was we took a tour of
Anorad Corporation - an engineering company nearby that makes, among other things, the huge machines that put big plasma tv's through quality testing (i.e. checking every single pixel to make sure it works in an insanely small amount of time). I don't know about anyone else, but I've never seen the insides of a large-scale engineering firm before this trip. Anorad has helped us by giving us the time of one of their engineers. He didn't design our entire bot. Rather, he offered us some advise about how to do things such as get CAD drawings ready for the machinists.