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Originally Posted by Chaos204
I have a larger problem when a team talks about sending the gearboxes to be professionally machined
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I feel that issues such as this aren't a problem. If you really consider it, buying stock parts or having other people machine your parts are simply a matter of economics. The teams simply made a decision that to pay for the cost of professional, precision machining would be worth the time and design effort they would save. Is it unfair? Not at all. If they have machining time donated, that should appear on their BOM. Thus, they take a significant (because machining costs are not small at all) portion of their robot cost budget in order to get the precision that they need/want for the design.
Anyone can get stuff machined, (especially since the advent of cool sites like emachineshop.com) and it will roughly cost the same amount on the BOM. Buying stock parts and systems is the same kind of issue.
There are many types of mechanical design--selection design, when you look for pre-made or pre-fabricated parts to accomplish things so you won't have to design your own--is an incredibly important one. To deny that it exists is entirely unrealistic, and a team that buys a pre-made assembly and adapts it to their robot has
succeeded in design. In certain circumstances, it may even be a wiser decision in terms of effort. If we had bought pre-made gearboxes last year it would have saved us three weeks of design and hundreds of man-hours and dozens of headaches, and had that manpower been focused instead on our arm and manipulator systems, we could have done better.
The point is that although it means you might do less work to design and manufacture parts, using pre-existing services and products is intelligent and a large facet of modern engineering and design.
Now, this ties into the larger issue. When there are teams that are all students and they build a robot, that's alright, fine. But with good engineering mentors and teamwork, they could be more inspirational. Proper selection design is simple and elegant, and in my mind, inspiring. I'm sure all of us who have been to competitions have been awestruck or at least wow-ed by some use of a product that we've never seen before, for example, Team 71's use of file cards to creep along the carpet, unstoppable in 2002. Sure, that's more creative than most such uses, but the point is that buying and using premade parts and adapting them to robots is a critical part of FIRST and engineering in general.
I was once in a computer lab in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Purdue, and I overheard a conversation in which one student was proposing to make a spacer by ordering a piece of stock and sitting at the lathe for several hours to make it the correctly. Had this guy the experience to know, then he would have just ordered the same part off of McMaster-Carr and would have perhaps had to spend 10 minutes on the lathe. Someone in his group, who I knew, and had done FIRST before, directed the guy to the McMaster-Carr website, and the guy was like, "Ohh..."
For me, at least, those "Ohh..." moments are often the most inspiring in my life. I used to be a student and now I'm a mentor, so I've seen both sides of the coin. I used to feel (when I was a student) that I should be doing a lot more of the work, that the mentors should be doing less. But when you work with engineering mentors, that "Ohh..." thing happens a lot. And you learn that trial and error methods are time-intensive and there are ways to do component design and selection that minimize weight and optimize design while still having the same functions, and that one of the few ways to learn those ways are through an engineering education and background.
And then you realize...
If you hadn't been working ALONGSIDE those engineers...you'd never have that other person to say, "Well, why don't you do this, so that it works?"
And you'd never have been able to say "Ohh..."