New Workshop...Tool Advice Needed

[Tristan Lall]

School budgets being what they are (often tight and often controversial), it's important to get good value for money. Can you help us understand what's good value from your team's perspective, and from your school administration's perspective?

For example, what's the educational objective of the team: what does the school expect your robotics program to deliver from a skills/knowledge point of view? How well does that match the educational objectives of the school (like academics, vocations, sports, etc.)?

Is the team going to be doing FRC only, or is this a space for robotics of other sorts that might vary from time to time? Who else in the school will be using the wood and metal shops, and what do they need?

What kinds of parts do you want to learn how to make in-house, and which parts will you want to learn how to outsource? Don't waste your money on a machine if a sponsor can provide the service (at adequate levels of cost, reliability, timeliness, educational value, etc.).

For example, if you can get CNC-milled parts elsewhere, then do you really need that very nice mill?¹ Maybe you can make do with a small, cheap manual machine for odd jobs—in which case a used Bridgeport clone is a good idea. On the other hand, machining by hand is not a skill in high demand these days. It's entirely feasible to skip over the 1930s-era Bridgeports, straight to a modern CNC vertical mill, if the ability to run one of those is more valuable to your team. And if your team wants to focus on composites or sheet metal parts, you may want to invest elsewhere—autoclaves and brake presses aren't found in a lot of school machine shops, but they definitely have their uses.

That said, if you're going to be like the majority of FRC teams, and will be working a lot with aluminum extrusions, skip the horizontal bandsaw (not accurate enough) and the conventional chop/mitre saw (not worth it from a safety/reliability perspective) and get a cold saw to virtually eliminate finish machining on cut ends.

If you're going to weld aluminum, don't waste money on a name-brand welder. Get a good imported TIG designed for about 200 A arc current, and spend money on the accessories. You're not going to achieve high duty cycles that require a particularly robust machine, and with the price differential you can have a more capable device in the first place.

A lathe is definitely nice to have for shafts and other rotating machinery. Assess your needs realistically: if you don't plan to turn things like wheels and large pulleys (you can buy those), you might be better off with a smaller, higher quality machine that can make custom shafts. Maybe with CNC capability.

¹ Talk to team 610 about the Haas TM-1P. They have one.