[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by jamie_1930

I'm just wondering if someone could give me a list of some of the things they do with their lathes and mills for FRC. I would love to get some for my team, but I'm going to need a good justification of what we'll do with them. I used a lathe a lot my first year to make wheel spacers, but that's all I can remember specifically.

We have our lathe going almost continually during the season.

We make all our shafts from rod or hex depending on what they're used for. In a typical 6 wheel drive train that is about 12 true shafts and 4 tensioning shafts. Add in any other custom transmissions and that number grows quickly.

Spacer. We make so many delrin spacers for gearboxes and all sorts of things that we almost always tack a 6 foot delrin rod onto the end of any McMaster order just to make sure we have it.

Drilling and tapping concentric holes in a shaft is easiest on the lathe.

Making adapter pieces to go from square to round tubing (loving called squovals by the students) this requires a 4-jaw chuck.

Knurling rollers.

Boring out gears and sprockets.

Making bearing pockets.

Turning threads off bolts to make axels, see our 2009 robot with about 30 of these...

Making new AndyMark output shafts. This is part of how we make our drive pods.

Those are just reasons I can think of off the top of my head. I think the lathe is the one indispensible machine tool in any shop.

Edit: Also make sure to get hex collets when you buy your lathe tool set. With all the Hex broached gears AndyMark sell this makes custom transmissions much easier.