To CNC? Or not to CNC?

[jacob_dilles]

Originally Posted by phrontist

We are in Falls Church, VA (Very close to DC, West Falls Church Metro is literally a stones throw from our building). Any teams nearby have a CNC we could use?

we are in Vienna, Va (22181) James Madison Hs. stop on by we have a 3 axis. but we have no idea how to use it, so we could learn together

[tenfour]

As 'ol sanddrag commented, CNCs are not magic. For most applications that can be found in FIRST, manual machines work fine. Lets face it, very little teams need .0002 accuarcy, esp. considering that a human hair is 10X that distance.

There are a lot of the Bridgeport machines out there that you could buy or have donated. I would them spend your money on some tooling for it that will make it like "a manual machine of steroids." This includes some nice cutters, a digital readout, a good vice, and an indexing head.

I would also venture to say that a lot of the time, work can be done on the Manual faster because you kinda just plug and play. There is little setup when compared to the CNC (requires a lot of initial setup and expertise).

PM me if you need more information or have any questions.

[DanArgent]

Sorry phrontist, as I am a member of your team I can safely say that we do not currently have the funds for a CNC. Besides, I believe Dixie sheet metal has one and they are ussualy more than generous in helping us out.

[cmaccoy]

You guys could take a class for Milling. My uncle owns a business that does all milling. If you guys really wanted to go the whole way, you should get mastercam . We use it right now and it has learning software which isn't hard to learn. Also i'm not too sure but i think because this is kinda a school program you guys could probably get the educational version (a lot cheaper). Enough of me yappin, heres the sight www.mastercam.com. **GOOD LUCK**