[MrForbes]

In the US, there used to be vocational training at most high schools, but that is mostly gone now. Community colleges have taken over most vocational training, and there are some programs where high school students can take classes at a community college. In an ironic twist of fate, it seems that these days the "math and science" students need to take the vocational classes so they can learn the fabrication skills necessary to build robots, and then go to engineering school.

Learning to TIG weld aluminum takes time, and some people are better at it than others. I am not very good at it, although I took some community college courses. I have seen some great welding work by high school students, but students with both the skill and the motivation to become good welders are rare.

You might want to consider using CAD to help you design the robot, but design it in a way that you can build the parts using the existing manual equipment you have, or so that it can be built with less expensive manual equipment you can buy.

We did this successfully last year, making a CAD model of the robot that we built out of wood, pipe, simple aluminum pieces, etc. The trick is to consider how you will fabricate the parts as you are designing them, and keep improving the design to make the fabrication process as simple and easy as you can.