In the past few years, many of our robot parts have been designed with precise angles. On our milling machine, it is easy to cut, slot, and face parts at 90 degrees, but not so easy to cut a 45, a 60 or an odd degree angle. And a compound angle? Forget it! Our 2014 robot needed the end of one chassis brace cut at 58.455 degrees, while rotated at 32.15 degrees.
Although we've been making do with a plastic protractor and our eyeballs, the proper tool to cut angles on a mill is a
sine plate. Sine plates can be purchased at any tooling outlet, however they are not very complicated, so we will fabricate our own. It will be a good exercise for our team to learn and practice our lathe and millwork so that we are prepared to handle whatever the 2016 robot design demands. The finished sine plate will be a valuable addition to our shop tooling and should outlast me.
So I will try to post our progress, designs, challenges, photos and any other good stuff as we work through. Hopefully other teams can benefit from it.
Because it's a fun challenge. Kind of like Sudoku, but with lexan and evil geniuses. - nathanww [more] 
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