How important is a machine shop?

[archiver]

Posted by Gui Cavalcanti at 05/17/2001 5:01 PM EST


Student on team #422, Mech Tech, from Governor's School (GSGIS) and Verizon.


In Reply to: How important is a machine shop?
Posted by bill whitley on 05/15/2001 4:34 PM EST:



Bill,
A machine shop is not necessary to a large scale; we (Team 422) only used welding once, to build our claws, and the rest was pretty much assembled by hand tools and spare pieces of aluminum/lexan. We took modularity to the max this year, however; we attached our pneumatics and electronics board (on a cage) by VELCRO to the undercarriage/drivetrain of our robot. It works really well, and two people can take apart the entire robot in under 1 minute, including all electrical and pneumatic connections.
We've never had problems with this modularity, and our top has never fallen off. We probably could've done without the claw welding, and would've been fine. To combat all arguments that we were not competitive, well, we were 17th out of 335 at Nationals and 7th out of 83 in Galileo.

By the way, I've never even heard of a lathe, wireEDM (I should've, though, because I helped out a lot with the electronics), or CNC. Anyone care to explain?

Gui Cavalcanti

PS: Our robot weighed in at 129.5 pounds this year, and would've probably weighed less with welds. Nothing lost, though.