Advanced tools in the workshop (Mill, Lathe, Welder etc.)

[Leav]

Hi,

This year my team used a small cnc mill designed to mill plastic in order to fabricate certain parts (mostly motor brackets) from aluminum.

More complicated or just larger parts were not possible to do in house and were done by mentors or sponsors at other locations.

For next season, I'm looking to push the capabilities of the team forward in two ways: making the team more reliant on CAD (since we had alot of problems with integration which would have been solved by using CAD) and adding advanced fabrication capabilities to the workshop.

I'm trying to learn from the experiance of teams which already have these tools in the workshop, or teams which have tried to integrate them but were unsuccessful for some reason.

some examples:
Mill (either DRO or CNC) - we have shown this season that a bigger, more powerful, mill could be utilized by our team since we have outgrown the capabilities of our small mill.

Lathe - again our small lathe (the size of a pc keyboard) is stressed way beyond it's capabilties and a bigger one could be of great value.

Aluminmum welder - like many FIRST teams, we do alot of aluminum welding and I have been seeing that there are at least a few teams where the welds are done on site by students. I think this is great and awesome and was just wondering if this is practical for any team or are there special circumstances where this is possible/practical.

I'd like input regarding:
1) cost (purchasing, repairs, materials, upkeep...) [let's go for US cost and i'll add 100% to every number..]
2) difficulty for students to learn (how long would the training take, for example)
3) safety (can the students use the machine at all? can they do so unsupervised?)
4) anything else you have to say on the matter!


Thanks for your input!

-Leav