[sanddrag]

While I haven't yet read this thread, I feel inclined to comment. We here at 696 too have noticed the proliferation of prefabricated parts and mechanisms in FIRST in the last few years. It certainly is a different FIRST than when I started in it 15 years ago. Nonetheless, we've invested quite heavily in CNC manufacturing software and equipment in the past 3 years. While our students are gaining awesome skills while making awesome parts, we've also noticed that it's increasingly becoming a losing battle to compete with some of these COTS parts. I can spend more than two weeks designing and manufacturing a gearbox that costs me maybe $150 and hopefully works like I designed it, or I can spend 10 minutes punching my credit cart into a website to get a roughly equivalent outcome (performance-wise) for $100 more.

While I'd like for us to make everything, like in the good ol days, it's not competitive for us to do so anymore. I mean shoot, we even used to make sprockets from bar stock. Now, every time we order a COTS part, it's not because we can't make it in-house, it's because we've elected to buy time. When you buy COTS parts, you are buying time, and that makes it a very attractive option. This year we've taken a little bit of a different approach of "if you can't beat em, join em" and I think you'll see it in our selection of COTS components on our robot.

That said though, there is still plenty of custom work to be done, and by using COTS components in some areas, we've been able to focus our efforts toward branching out into new manufacturing techniques such as CNC lathe and CNC plasma for other areas of the machine.

Also, learning how to source things from a catalog, configure a product with multiple options, and interpret manufacturer specifications and data sheets is a very useful skill for students to learn, but the offerings from FRC vendors are very FRC specific, and may not provide quite the same experience as working with more traditional industrial component manufacturers and vendors.

Finally, if you buy COTS, and do not do any real fabrication, you're essentially limiting yourself to what's available from the COTS vendors, and perhaps even to FIRST robotics as an activity. Our lab and program is set up in a way that while FIRST Robotics is a major component of what we do, it's not the only thing we could do. With our in house manufacturing capability, if FIRST were to become nonexistent tomorrow, we could overnight switch into building literally any other kind of project. And with how much we've spent on FIRST this year, we honestly could have taken the year off and bought and restored a 68 Firebird instead.