QotW 09-14-03: Capability.

[Madison]

This week's question is very straightforward. Consider it a survey of sorts, if you will, intended to get a better idea of what capabilities teams have.

Question of the Week 09-14-03: What sort of manufacturing capability does your team have? What machining tools are available to you (i.e., lathe, mill, CNC lathe, etc.)? Do students do your machine work or are sponsors or third parties responsible for it? How much of your finished robot is machined in some regard?

I know there are teams with access to enormous machine shops and there are teams with access to little more than basic hand tools. I'm interested in seeing which is more common.

[Jeff Waegelin]

When I was on 201, we worked out of the Auto Shop at our school, so we had a rather extensive set of hand tools, plus a manual Bridgeport mill, manual lathe, drill press, horizontal and vertical bandsaw, plasma cutter, and MIG welder. We did everything we could on our own, but some things, like aluminum welding and some CNC work on our gearboxes, just couldn't be done using our tools available. Those kinds of things we handed off to the prototype shop at GM R&D, our sponsor.

[Ian W.]

Well, 810, um, I'm not really sure what we have.

I do know that the manual milling machine, that has been sitting in our room for, oh, only about a year or so now, will finally be getting the correct power wired to it, and a little enclosure built around it, so we'll have a nice old milling machine that we can use to do inhouse work now, which makes me very happy. It used to make airplane parts, so as far as I'm concerned, once it works, it'll be good enough for us .

We also have one student on the team that has a small milling machine, lathe, drill press, etc in his basement, which we used last year for small parts and such.

We might have a machine shop helping us this year, for large and/or complex parts, but Mr. Dennis, our technical mentor, wants to do everything in house, because he didn't like how most of our stuff was machined last year (I'm trying to stay out of that whole argument).

We do have a woodshop at our school, as well as an autobody shop, but my team refuses to use any wood at all (for various reasons), and I'm not sure of the capabilites of the autobody shop, but I'm pretty sure they don't have much. I don't even think they have a bandsaw.

After that, we don't have much else. Your basic handtools. Oh, and a bunch of tables, and chairs, and um, pizza. That's an important tool too .

[Cory]

we have a small tabletop mill, a drill press, a vertical bandsaw, and assorted hand and power tools at our school workroom.

At our sponsor's machine shop we have manual and CNC mills and lathes, bench grinders, vertical bandsaws, drill presses, Wire EDM, a CNC punch ( I really want to play with that thing ) very large shears, sheet metal benders, and all sorts of other assorted goodies. They have MIG and TIG welders, and Id assume they have a plasma cutter somewhere around the place.

Cory

[Mike Schroeder]

THe hs has a drill press..... that barely cuts through wood, which is why we use the shop at BMS, they got alot of cool toys

[sanddrag]

At school we have a 14" compound mitre saw, a RIGID floor drill press, a bench grinder, a belt/disc combo sander and all the hand tools you could thing of.

For space at school we have one room approximately 12'x12' that is ours to leave a mess. We get to use an adjacent room that is about 30x50 but it must be cleaned up every day. Additionally, we have a "closet shop room" in which we store and use the big tools like the drill press. That room is "ours" as well and is about 5x11 in size.

At the local college (7 miles, 14 minutes away), we have access to the fully equipped machine shop and have full welding support available as well.

Our students do the majority of the machine work. It is only the MasterCam stuff they don't do.

The machine shop has very large verticle and horizontal band saws. There is an abrasive chop saw in the welding shop next door and a toothed chop saw in the machine shop. There are many bench grinders and a precision surface grinder. In the welding shop there is a very large shear and a cutting torch (not sure if it's a plasma cutter or not.)

The machine shop has 5 brideport manual mills, 7 manual lathes, a 4 axis CNC mill (HAAS VF4), a 3 axis CNC mill (HAAS VF2), and a HASS CNC lathe. There are also two tool rooms and a bunch of tool drawers around the shop containing thousands of collets, end mills, lathe cutters, and various other machining tools. Additionally, there is a room full of about 25 computers with AutoCAD and MasterCAM.

Anything at all short of needing a 5+ axis CNC mill, this shop can make it.

At the college we also have access to a couple rapid prototyping machines.


For what we actualy use, the tops of it would be our students using about 4 of the manual mills at once and a couple lathes at the same time too making many many parts for the robot. Every year we have somewhere around 30 something machined parts not counting the corner triangles. We have had students running jobs on the CNC for many hours -- extrusion joining corner triangles and sponsor plaques. Students programmed the machine for the sponsor plaque job. We had a machinist run a couple window motor adapter shafts on the CNC as well.

We use everything we have at school quite a bit except for the giant conduit bender. I still don't know why we have that thing.

Oh, and our school has no shop classes. Just robotics.

One more thing. With how equipped we are, we should be able to make a robot that looks like a professionally built product. Not somethign a bunch of kids slapped together like we have been doing. Go see what I mean and click here.

EDIT: I forgot to add that at school in the 30x50 room we have 12 Pentium 4 1.8 GHz computers with Invetor, Photoshop, Premiere, and a T1 connection.

[Kevin A]

DART 481 Has a small CNC mill and CNC lathe, a 9'' drill press, a sheet metal break(Sp?), tig welder, plasma cutter, band saws, table saw, belt sander, pneumatic tools, compressor, and some hand tools. This year we adopted the old wood shop and all its tools!

We also use Chevron, our sponsor, for some stuff we cant do. This year, we have the tools, now we need the skillz.

Kevin

[Tytus Gerrish]

Arc welding, If it wasant for oir large ammounts of arc-welders at inlet grove HS Formaly Northtech (A vocational school) Swampthingf would have been made of wood again instead of the Aluminum it is, Look at my signature

[ebmonon36]

On 1018, we had a giant bandsaw with a 6 foot blade, the dinosaur (our mechanical hacksaw that could walk across the shop), several drill presses and bench grinders, a lathe tablesaws, a spot welder, arc welders, probably a gas welder and all the handtools you could want. Hurco Co. was one of our sponsors. They design and manufacture CNC mills across the street from our school, so we can have one of our engineers who works there machine things for us.
Eric

[ZACH P.]

umm, we've got a hacksaw, me, a big Russian guy, and a screwdriver. and some other people. lol

[Ashley Weed]

My hs team was not fortunate in the big tools area, we worked out of a middle school wood shop in a very rural America school. Imagine the possibilities of a drill press and a bandsaw!

[Jeff Waegelin]

Originally posted by Ashley Weed
My hs team was not fortunate in the big tools area, we worked out of a middle school wood shop in a very rural America school. Imagine the possibilities of a drill press and a bandsaw!

Our 2002 robot was built out of a middle school wood shop, too. Our school was being renovated, so we didn't have access to our shop for the whole 2002 season.

[Rickertsen2]

last year we had the following:
mini CNC lathe (emco compact CNC rev. 3)
2 old decrepid bandsaws from the cave man days an no guards
chopsaw, with partly plastic deck that melts when you cut metal
sheet metal bender with peices missing
large book cutter, which we mistook for a plate cutter( it worked allright)
rotary disk sander(meant for wood but works quite well on metal)
a gaimongous drill press
several 1/2" drills
oodles of hand tools
other assorted wood tools.

This year we got some new stuff though. There is actually a funny (well not for me) story behind that. One day went to change the blade in the bandsaw, which is adjacent to an old drill press. Aparantly, somehow something shorted out and caused the frame of the drill press to be electrically hot. Now of course the frame of the bandsaw is grounded. I am touching the bandsaw with one hand, and holding the new blade in the other. The blade touches the drill press. BOOM!! Large explostion of sparks and i am knocked unconcious for about a second. That was not fun! So anyway the technology department head takes the pratically welded in half bandsaw blade to the school administration and manages to get them so see the safety hazards of the old tools. Anyway we have new ones now. This is an improvemnet but not much. We are hoping that we can find a sponsor, who will let us use their shop.

[Sachiel7]

Everyone has it so good...

Well, since were not a school (were a homeschooling team) our build locations have ranged from a 2 car garage, half full, and a basement that was being renovated.
As far as the extent of our tools...
We have at least 1 d-press each year, at least one large saw (table, cutoff,etc.), and alot of hand tools. Drills, Sawzalls (I prob spelled it wrong ) and your typical lineup.
This past year we had someone who let us borrow his welding tools, but we didn't use them much.
As far as building goes we ALWAYS build 100% of our bot, alone.
We are pretty adaptive too. We've done pretty good in competition so far (I've done first for 2-3 years now, but we started a new team for the 2003 season)

[Rickertsen2]

Originally posted by Sachiel7
Everyone has it so good...

Well, since were not a school (were a homeschooling team) our build locations have ranged from a 2 car garage, half full, and a basement that was being renovated.
As far as the extent of our tools...
We have at least 1 d-press each year, at least one large saw (table, cutoff,etc.), and alot of hand tools. Drills, Sawzalls (I prob spelled it wrong ) and your typical lineup.
This past year we had someone who let us borrow his welding tools, but we didn't use them much.
As far as building goes we ALWAYS build 100% of our bot, alone.
We are pretty adaptive too. We've done pretty good in competition so far (I've done first for 2-3 years now, but we started a new team for the 2003 season)

Try to find a local company, who would be willing to let you use their eqipment.