Quote:
Originally Posted by ICanCountTo19
Although I do like the quote I don't completely agree with how applicable it is. Hypothetically, I can work at a mill for 2 hours making a part from a drawing that I worked equally hard on. Yes I am successful and the part works, but I spent 2 hours more than a team with a CNC mill that doesn't need to work as hard or as long to achieve the same thing. Or they could order the part and get in machined professionally...I hate to say it but...there are some circumstances in which cash can be a substitute for hard work. With more time and resources there is not an even playing field.
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Just because a team fabricates a part on a CNC milling machine does not mean it was faster than it could have been created on a manual milling machine.
There are a lot of "extra steps" involved with CNC work that add a lot of time onto the procedure, such as creating the NC program and testing/simulating it. The only time it becomes faster to make parts on a CNC mill is when the complexity of the part goes through the roof or when you have a large production run (dozens, hundreds, or even thousands) to make.
For the vast majority of the time, these situations are not the norm during the FRC build season. There isn't much one can't make between a lathe and a milling machine with rotary table and DROs. Sure, you may not get fancy triangulated lightening pockets (although square ones are
very easy to make, especially with DROs), but you can have fully functional parts.
I've seen a lot of teams get so worked up on "OMG, we have a CNC machine!!1!" that they spend so much time and energy making pretty wheel rims or milling their team logo into a sheet of aluminum or Lexan (or in other words, parts which have no bearing on the success of the robot) that they kind of "forget" about designing/fabricating a smart mechanism, and end up with some plywood last minute creation that only works halfway as well as it could have.