[tenfour]

As 'ol sanddrag commented, CNCs are not magic. For most applications that can be found in FIRST, manual machines work fine. Lets face it, very little teams need .0002 accuarcy, esp. considering that a human hair is 10X that distance.

There are a lot of the Bridgeport machines out there that you could buy or have donated. I would them spend your money on some tooling for it that will make it like "a manual machine of steroids." This includes some nice cutters, a digital readout, a good vice, and an indexing head.

I would also venture to say that a lot of the time, work can be done on the Manual faster because you kinda just plug and play. There is little setup when compared to the CNC (requires a lot of initial setup and expertise).

PM me if you need more information or have any questions.