Recently 2869 expanded its build space into 2 joined rooms. It is not massive but its definitely an amazing size coming off the previous amount of space we have had. The main room is 690 Square Feet. We then have a 3' by 3' closet along with a around 230 square foot side room. In the main room we have all of our tools. Mill, lathe, drill presses, chop saws, table saw, bench grinder, belt sander, metal brake, small arbor press, and small cnc router. Along both sideq walls there is copper piping with pneumatic quick disconnects and there are original outlets everywhere along the walls as the room used to be part of a auto tech lab many many years ago. In the center there are retractable pneumatic and power drops. We then have 8 Hardwood tables. 4 of them are ones we built after we found the wood getting thrown out. Those 4 are about 5' long and 2 feet wide. The wood is about 2" thick and is extremely strong. It was a lot of work to get them to a good looking condition but was well worth it. The homemade ones will hold machines mostly. They are less wide making them better for machines then work. The other 4 were given to us by the school. They are bigger at around 3' wide by 6" long. The tabletop is similar in strength but, the legs on them are going to be stronger. Those tables will be run down the center of the room as well as down the one side wall and will be used for electrical, and assembly. In the main room we also built a loft out of 1/8" thick 1.25*1.25 steel L bracket. This loft is made for sheet material storage as well as long metal storage. It allows that stuff to not get forgotten behind a table and since we had the metal laying around after salvaging it from a shelving unit it was free. The metal stock we use the most is stored under 2 of the machine tables on top of a little ledge. The rest of our materials (Small pieces of aluminum, pvc, wood, and pool noodles) are stored in the closet in a wooden organizer. Along the back wall there is a large folding lunch table with a vise mounted to it. It is the biggest remnant of how we used to work which involved rolling everything into the hallway. This table is very useful because we can keep it down for the building portion of the season for extra space and keep our carpet underneath it. When its time to practice we can fold it up it then taking about 4' by 2' of space and have a carpet fold out. The carpet isnt huge probably 15x15 but its still nice for some practice. The back of the room will also store practice game elements which depending on the game will either be used in our room or brought to a larger room like a gym, or cafeteria. The last few things in the main room are all of our hand tools which are either stored in carts, homemade organizers, or small bins along with all of our hardware which currently needs to be organized. The last bit of stuff that is in our room is the electrical and pneumatic carts.
The side room is connected with a large windowed door from the main room. It also has metal strengthened Windows along 1/2 of it allowing whoever is working in either room to see each other. One side of that room is shelving where we store most of our COTS parts, and other non robotics stuff like T-shirts, tents, banners, ect. We also store our old robots in this room which currently means a single bot from the 2015 offseason
. There is then a large stack of totes which house some very long term storage. Stuff like our old vex parts and giant resistor collection we probably will only need once every few years. The rest of the room is tables and chairs housing our CAD and Programming teams. There are going to be about 4 or 5 computers in there 3 for CAD and 2 programming. We are still waiting back on a sponsor who could provide us more then enough of both, but for now we are limited to 5. The CAD pc's will also be utilized by the programming team later in the season when most of the CAD is 'done'. This room will be kept much cleaner then the main room as we will also use it to eat during the season. It will contain a mini fridge and microwave and is heated and air conditioned making it an overall nice room to eat in.
So, that's basically it. If you read through that wall of text good job. I mostly wrote it for myself to organize my thoughts and figured someone would probably read it and get a few ideas from it. The expansion is still a work in progress. 4 of the tables are still being built. The center drops still have to be mounted, the mill still has to get wired up, and some remnants of the side room (Computer trash) need to be moved. But overall its going great and having this much space is amazing.