Quote:
Originally Posted by mentorDon
OOOHHH! Life isn't fair I'm told. How many of you squawking that sentiment have access to a sponsor with CNC equipment? Consider yourself lucky. And I'm willing to make a large wager most teams don't. We had one once. But with the economy as it is, they couldn't support us any longer. So we adapted to what we have. And then there is the lack of machine shops. Kansas City use to have shops scattered throughout the city. Not any more. Most of that work has moved to Mexico or China. I started working in a machine shop back in 1974. I have seen and experienced the change. And I don't see NASA building a shop here anytime soon.
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As a team working in the back of a physics classroom, and then a garage, a barn (moving in February in Pennsylvania), and then being kicked from warehouse to warehouse literally for years, we raised the money to buy our own CNC. We also grew in many other ways (we learned CAD, bought and taught ourselves welding, started understanding drive trains, prototyping, constantly worked long summers). Won our first award, started making elims. We moved
12 times in 6 years, including during build season. Once we finally got the CNC set up in all that--years after we bought it--we started leveraging it. Our students do all our in-house CNCing. In fact, right now we don't have a mentor with their skill sets. We managed to pick up some small local machining sponsor's time also, but only after we started winning. I've honestly been surprised how much people like to sponsor success.
So to answer your question, we do have CNCing, we earned it tooth and nail, and we still consider ourselves lucky. Accidents of geography are a thing. Success without insanely hard work is not.