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The amount of engineering and manufaction support depends on your team objectives and resoureces. Our team objective is to have the students do as much as possible, including the design and manufacturing. Partly because we have limited engineering and financial resources, but primarily because we want to get students involved and learn about engineering.
We may not have the most competitive machine but over the last five years we have come a long way. Our first year we didn't know what a lathe or mill were and only had access to the High School shop which was limited to drill press and band saw. However, through the competitions and seeing what the other teams did we learned what was necessary to be successfull. Over the last couple of years we got the local university, CSU, to be one of the sponsors. The high school students enrolled in the CSU ME shop course and were certified to use the CSU machine shop. They learned how to weld, use the lathes and mills. Last year we won one of the design awards and this year, the high school students did most all the machining for the robot.
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