New season, New tools

[cbale2000]

The thing with picking a first choice for a new machine really depends on the methods your team use (or plan to use) for construction.


Speaking from the perspective of a team that has all 4 of the items you're looking at, in my experience, I would estimate our team utilizes mills (and occasionally 2-axis CNC mills) for roughly 80% of the custom part construction for our robots. Our entire chassis frame is cut using our mills and assembled with machine screws, as are most of the mechanisms on our robots.

Having a lathe can also be very useful though in our case it's not utilized nearly as much, particularly due to the ease of getting "off the shelf" shafts (though when you do actually need it to make something, a lathe is indispensable).

As far as welding goes, until this year we hadn't had a weld on a robot since 2003, partially due to a lack of anyone who knew how to use a welder, but mostly due to a lack of need to use it.

We got our 3D printer this year and struggled to find good applications for it on our robot, we found it useful for making several non-critical parts but decided against using it for any higher-stress applications. Mostly we use it as a time saver (having it make simple parts while we do something else) instead of for its ability to make complex objects.


Again, this just our experience, the usefulness of any of these tools comes down to how a team utilizes them for their build process and what type of robot you build.