Quote:
Originally Posted by yarden.saa
Hi there,
I was wondering how teams survived the age before andymark.
where did they make their gearbox, wheels....?
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We made our own gear boxes. We had a two speed gear box and ever year we made two gear boxes and two spares. We did this in 2005, 2006 and 2007. It cost $1,100 a pair in machining labor, raw material, gears to be made, some gears later we switched to mcmaster carr gears but we still had a lot of money in gears.
In 2008, we decided to try the AndyMark toughbox because we where trying to save money in our budget and didn't want our sponsor PHD, Inc. to have to spend $2,200 in 4 gear boxes for us, and the time it takes for us to fabricate our own gear boxes was a huge savings.
All of those years 2005, 2006, and 2007, the gear box was always the last part on the robot to be finished. Because of the rules of FIRST, we had to make new transmissions each year, (plus spares) because they are custom parts.
AndyMark not only makes good parts, but I don't even THINK they realize how much money they are saving each team. Since 2008, our team has saved a little over $4,000 in just transmissions alone buy purchasing off the shelf "COTS". We used 6 NANO transmissions this year. That would have $3,300 if we would have made them ourselves. Instead 6 AndyMark cost $468.00. That's just good business sense, time savings and a good way for use to stretch our sponsor money for maximum return.
I encourage you to check out Cyber Blues 234 white paper:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2381
This same thought process of buying verses fabricating was what changed us as well in 2008.
So what did we do before Andy Mark?
We worked longer hours.
We worried longer when our fabricated transmissions where going to get done.
We didn't have a working prototype in 3 days with transmissions mounted.
We spent a lot more money that could of went elsewhere.
We didn't have cool "Ask me about my Robot" t-shirts.
Sure it's great to design and build your own. We have ours in a glass case now, been there done that...