Since 2002 have been and still are partnered with Glendale Community College where we are able to do al our macining for the build. The students must enroll in the class, but they get a huge discount for being HS students. It comes to only about $30 for the class and parking for the quarter (incredible deal). Anyway, the instructor is a very cool guy and very accomadating to us. He will stay late, and come in on weekends, and the students are not required to do the class curriculum (because we are in a crunch to make parts). The shop has three HAAS CNC Mills, a HAAS CNC lathe, about 5 bridgeports, and about 6 manual lathes. Some of the machines have DRO which is very nice. There are also large horizontal and vertical bandsaws. The shop is quite incredible, but the instructor has other students to teach, and those other students need time on the machines too. So it is a shared resource.
Next door there is a welding shop that is able to do some stuff for us. They did a few welds for us this year in a pinch, but we got the frame beautifully TIG welded (like a roll of nickles) at the place where the machine shop instructor works. At this shop, they manufacture high performance racing bicycles all day every day, so getting in a few welds for us after hours wasn't a big deal, and they were the nicest welds I have ever seen.
In 2005, we also partered with a local machine shop (Tru-Cut) owned by the uncle of one of our students. They were a huge help this year since we had more machines parts then ever before.
We try to have the students do the majority of the machining. The only thing they don't do is the MasterCAM and GibbsCAM stuff because we don't have it at school, and it would take a good while to learn.
The only thing the students don't really do is the welding. It is one of those things where we are just better off leaving it to the pros. Also, we don't have a welder nor money for one so that has a lot to do with it.
For sheet metal, in 2004 we aquired a new professional in the industry as a team mentor. He sells lasercutting machines as a profession and he has several shops around the southland who are clients of his. And between them, we can usually get anything we need to lasercut and and bent on a press brake.
At the high school, we have a very small shop space. We have a chop saw and a floor drill press, and a bench grinder and that's about it for the big tools. We also have a large assortment of hand tools and a few power tools (circular saw, drill, angle grinder). So, we rely on our gracious partners for fabrication purposes.
The biggest challenge has been computers for Inventor. Currently we have ONE that we just recently acquired. I had to bring down my computer quite often simply because we didn't really have one to use. We relied on students laptops too. It made it hard to learn when their weren't many computers at the work site to use. The school was gracious enough to lend two students laptops which they could keep for the duration of the build and until after the regional, but they were hardly capable of running Inventor. It was miserable.
We don't have a good plan to remedy the computer situation. That's what we get when our workshop is a (shared) lab full of Apples but our single new donated IBM computer (which is totally free and clear of and no way associated with the school, only the team is a great start. I just hope the students are able to take care of it.
The one big problem is that if the school were to give us computers they most likely would have Novell and all sorts of other restrictions and stuff on them that would make it a nightmare to actually get any work done.