[Wayne Doenges]

ohk i know you said look for other threads but i have one last point. look at the new pic from team 1501 now not to take a shot at their team but honestly they must have a pretty high tech shop to build that by themselves. just to prove my point because most responses said that they build their own robot so i was just curious about 1501. Although as other replies have said there is no "right" way so watever works for your team i was just throwing the idea out there

Thanks for the off handed complement (high tech shop).
Our robot this year was 95% built by us. The other 5% were the trannies. They were manufactured and donated by one of our sponsors but assembled by the students.
Last year we built our awesome robot (shameless plug ) in a church basement wood shop. That's right, a wood shop. Our high tech tools were a band saw, a table saw and a drill press. Along with the Clecos and Cleco pliers.
This year we built it in a warehouse from space donated by another of our sponsors. They let us use their Bridgeport and lathe.
We used the Bridgeport to mill our sprockets and to drill the 6 hole wheelchair wheel pattern. The lathe was used to create joining parts for the wheelchair wheels for our shooter. we could not use students for these processes as they were building the bot, the electrical board and doing the programming.
As Chakorules stated all we do is form aluminum over a high tech wood form block.