I can relate to this situation. My team has been using basic milling methods to build our robots for many years using square aluminum tubing and polycarbonate sheets. This year a new mentor joined the team who has access to a local machine shop that he works at (and his family owns) that can, amongst other things, do sheet metal fabrication.
Having never designed for sheet metal fabrication though, we chose to stick with our usual machining methods this year.
