Waterjet vs. Manual Build Process?

[s5511]

Our team has also recently obtained a waterjetting sponsor, who is willing to make sheet metal parts for us. What press brake do you all use do bend your sheet metal parts? We are looking for one that costs less than $2000.

[techhelpbb]

Going to agree with BeardyMentor and Gdeaver on this:
You can't build the entire robot with the waterjet unless you simply are using a lot of other COTS parts.

There's nothing wrong with using a waterjet, CNC or whatever other tool you have access to; unless you eventually end up abdicating know-how from it. If you find you have some experienced engineers CAD/CAM/CNC your parts (IE the students have no part of the drawing, design or manufacture) for the students all the time: maybe those tools are not helping.

Also if your team is large enough hand crafting may not be a big deal.
Personally though, I think all students that want to do fabrication should hand craft before they start playing with CNC anything.
I find it somewhat distressing if a student can't tell me how to location find or square up parts on a mill or anything like that.

[Xifilzer]

Thank you all for your input, we greatly appreciate it! While we will continue to have this debate, the input we received from this greatly helps us, thanks again!

Sincerely,
Xifilzer

[ebarker]

Originally Posted by s5511

Our team has also recently obtained a waterjetting sponsor, who is willing to make sheet metal parts for us. What press brake do you all use do bend your sheet metal parts? We are looking for one that costs less than $2000.

It is a slight bit over $ 2,000 but we got this a year ago and it works well for many operations.

http://www.jettools.com/us/en/p/bpf-...t-clamp/752125

[Monochron]

It will entirely depend on the resources that your team currently has. For our team we split the workload between tasks that needed high precision, and those that could get by on COTS parts or with less precision. The team did manual fabrication on the latter while our sponsor machined the parts that we had designed. The design + CNCing took roughly the same amount of time as the manual fabrication did, so we were able to move to integration much quicker than before.