How does your team find work space?

[Chris is me]

1714 works, meets, and does everything in our head mentor's plastic fabrication shop, American Acrylics. It undoubtedly takes some time and money from him, but we're really glad he's let us have the space. He's gotten a Volunteer of the Year award partly for that (and hopefully a WFFA in the future).

There are many benefits to this setup for us. We get access to mills, lathes, and all of that good stuff for machining. Polycarbonate sheet is on hand for assembly, as is acrylic for prototyping and templating. We have readily available access to a laser cutting tool that will etch and cut acrylic easily, which we use for everything from our peer awards to template making to the turret on this year's robot. By cutting acrylic sheet, we can attach the laser cut acrylic sheeting to polycarbonate and use a router to make faux-lazer cut polycarbonate sheets. This is how the side of the robot was made among many, many other parts.

Perhaps the least obvious benefit is that on snow days, common in Wisconsin, instead of being screwed out of a build day, we get 7 more hours to build in the shop!