pic: Finished side plates w/paint

[cadandcookies]

Originally Posted by roystur44

I bet that 3/16" alum panel took over 1.5 hour to make each piece and the 1/8" part on the MITS laser was a little under 1 hour. The time to pierce the material for all the small cosmetic holes is considerable. It looks like it weights a lot.

A CNC punch press would take about 3 minutes to produce the side panel. If the material was .060-.080 alum it would take about 10 minutes to laser cut a part.

A well designed sheet metal part with some folds could take a fraction of time to make and a fraction of the cost to produce.

Just some food for thought to keep costs down for teams with new sponsors.

At the same time, when you have a hammer, you use it. I come from a team with a reasonably large amount of CNC milling and waterjet sponsors, but no sheet metal sponsors. Since we can't accurately create sheet metal parts (we have a cheap break in house, but it doesn't seem much use), we tend to lean on and adapt our parts to take advantage of our CNC milling and waterjet sponsors and adapt our parts to those techniques.

I can't speak for whether it's more practical to create such parts in a sheet metal punch system or not, but there's always a learning curve when you get access to new toys!

We make it a habit to ask our sponsors what sort of guidelines they would prefer us to use when designing parts for them to machine. Quick jobs and quick parts make for happy sponsors and a happy team.