How do you fund your big machinery purchases?

[frcguy]

I know there are quite a few teams that have done big machinery purchases (stuff like Haas mills, etc.). I'm curious: where do you secure funding for such big expenditures? Are there certain grants for this sort of thing? Did you go out and fundraise? Get sponsorships from the manufacturers? Maybe you even got it donated, but how?

I ask because we are currently building a new school campus, and with that I've started to think about what kind of tools we want to partner with our school to get put in our shop. While we're getting a 4'x8' ShopBot that the school is purchasing, I've started to think a bit bigger than that, stuff like a Haas VMC, a waterjet (while extremely unlikely), etc.

I'm interested to see how your team came to acquire all this awesome stuff!