What are some of your shop tips and tricks?

[polytechnique]

One of the easiest and quickest ways to prototype folded pieces (especially Lexan) is to use cardboard. Several times we've simply taken a piece of cardboard and cut it with scissors, fold it, etc to fit exactly how we need it to on our chassis, trace the resulting shape onto a big piece of plexiglass, and band-saw it.

Our battery holder this year was made out of a single piece of folded Lexan that molded around the entire battery with additional padding, so tight that if you set the battery in it, it would take a few seconds to slide down and hit the bottom. We had no battery jiggling issues this year, and the original design prototype never hit a CAD program. Just cardboard and origami. Not necessarily recommended practice, but it was what we needed at the time.

While there's always the insistence that exact measurements with tight tolerances are vital to your success, sometimes just making things relative to everything already in place is the easier and quicker option.