For those of you that don’t know, Anchor Labs is a company that is working to make manufacturing easier. We allow you to easily upload a part and order 1 unit or 1000 without having to worry about how it will be made.
I’m a FIRST alum and started the company a little over a year ago and we’re proud to announce we are now a FIRST diamond supplier.
A few big things that are going on this year:
This is our first year with a voucher in the KoP. You will find a $75 voucher on TIMS valid for plate parts that can be redeemed on our website.
Our sponsorship application is now open! Our sponsorship includes 10% off all orders, remote engineering support, and expedited orders.
Just talked to FIRST about this 30 seconds ago (of course it came to our attention right after I posted this thread). FIRST’s IT team is working on it now.
I just PM’d you your voucher code. For any other teams that can’t find their voucher code, feel free to email [email protected] and we can get it over to you. I’ll update this thread once we have some more info.
I’m a little bit confused about quantity. I put in a quote for 16 of a small plate part and got a quote of $16.01. This seems to imply that it would be $16.01 total if I ordered 16, or a unit price of $1. However when I add this part to my cart, it fills in quantity 16 with a unit price of $16.01 and a total price of $256.16.
Which interpretation is correct?
And an additional question: Is a lead time of 10-20 days (from the FAQ) accurate at the moment?
The price that shows on the parts page is per unit. I’ll put in a ticket to see if we can update the heading to make this clearer. The price in the cart doesn’t include the voucher so if you were to apply it, the effective unit price would be ~$11.32.
FRC teams can expect parts in much less than 10-20 business days. Right now our target is 5-10 business days; however, you will receive a more accurate estimated delivery date at checkout based on our current load.
We don’t have any official max sizes but at some point, the cost begins to become prohibitive. In general, most of the parts we do are < 10"x10"x8" in the size of their bounding boxes. If you were to quote a 33" long drivetrain frame member, the price would probably jump to a few hundred dollars as it cannot be done by a lot of our vendors.
We are a bit unique in 99% of parts are not manufactured in our facility (though we do have a shop). We are primarily a software company working on the Anchor Labs system which tries to find the most efficient (cost and time-wise) way to produce a part. We also are developing tools that automatically produce parts (through automated CAM and technologies like 3d printing) as well as automatically inspect parts.
This all adds up to us having a large number of vendors we work with for different sized parts depending on part geometry (a 14ft long shaft is very different than a 14ft long plate).
Do you do rotary work? Let’s say that we need a longer output shaft for a gearbox, but don’t have access to a lathe. Is that something you can take care of?
It seems like you’re a bit like an Uber for custom manufacturing, except instead of saying “please take me here,” we say “Please produce one of these.”
Thank you for the voucher! Just to check, this voucher can only be used on one singular part that is less than 10" x 10"? We couldn’t get as many 1" x 3" parts that fit into that area, correct?
Just thought I’d chime in and say thanks, I remember the first post announcing Anchor Labs and thought it was a great idea then and still do. I was really pleased to see your name on the voucher list this year, I hope the broader FRC Community can learn to take advantage of your service.
With a school district grant that would have gotten us a CNC Mill getting stuck in bureaucracy, we’ll definitely be throwing some business your way at some point this year.
Pass the word to those vendors: There’s an old phrase my grandmother had* for the ability to run 2x1x.063" box tubing. It’s called “a license to print money at least four months out of the year”.
That said, this is really neat stuff and I’m making sure our team takes a good hard look!
You’re not wrong. I went for 2x1 because it’s a size that is a solid answer to a lot of questions in FRC-class robots. (I think some people down in Texas would agree with me.) 5402 last year used a lot of that size plucked from the AndyMark shelves and run on their Haas, and I have to admit it had me spoiled.
3x1 was nice in 2016 for a more pronounced drop-center on drive, and we’ve done funky sizes before–but if you told me it was going to be meaningfully cheaper and faster to run 2x1 because we did a thing for FIRST teams to streamline that specific size*, I’m probably going to play ball.
*Something about not receiving G-code in the form of YouTube videos.
We’ve been monitoring our load to try to predict the last day we will be able to process orders to ensure they are delivered by stop build date. Right now, that date appears to be February 7, 2018. Orders placed by this date should arrive a few days before stop build date.
We will keep watching our load and keep everybody updated as to what the latest projection is. As always, you will receive a more accurate time estimate during checkout.
