Quote:
Originally Posted by R.C.
IMO,
I would just fundraise a little more and pay a shop to just do them for you. One year we paid a shop to waterjet about 200+ parts in various sizes and did about 1.5 sheets of work and came out around $800. This rate was a discounted rate for high schools, since then we have just found sponsors to help us out.
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I'll +1 this. Being able to offload gussets to a third party really helps our workload during the season. We have a laser cutting sponsor up here that usually has 24-48 hour turn around time on parts. We usually have most of our gussets and bellypan done on the laser.
If you need to make gussets in house, I believe most time efficient and cost effective solution is CNC Router. We love the Velox 5050 CNC Router and it does wood, plastic, aluminum sheet no problem. With some patience it even does aluminum billet fairly well! (We made some custom 7075 #35 chain sprockets this year on it. Worked great!) it'll set you back 6k, but it's a great tool that is fairly easy for students to learn and get good at.
Before we had access to these resources, the paper drill template was a good go-to. If you are making a similar hole pattern to to the vex gussets, you can always use the COTS gusset as your hole template. I will often use an old gusset lying around as a drill template when prototyping or making parts quickly.
Hope this helps!
-Mike