The COTs parts available through Vexpro, AndyMark, and McMaster made all of our design work very easy. I'm glad we have so many parts available now compared to years ago!
One part we end up making a lot of, and isn't easy to do if you are a low resource team with no mill/lathe, is spacer inserts for tubes. These let you do through-bolt connections that can be tightened without crushing the tube, so you actually have a strong bolted joint. For VexPro in particular, spacers like this that fit their Versaframe extrusion sizes could be very useful for some teams.
