We’re The Misfits, a new FRC team preparing to compete in the 2026 season. In our area, there are many established teams, but we’ve seen that not all students can access them due to:
High dues that make participation unaffordable.
Limited capacity, where teams prioritize students with prior experience.
Transportation challenges, making distant teams inaccessible to many.
Our mission is to remove these barriers and create an inclusive team where any student—regardless of experience, background, or resources—can thrive in robotics.
As we build up our infrastructure, we’re facing a challenge: access to CNC machines for part fabrication.
We’d love to hear from other teams:
How do you access CNC machines?
Do you own one, partner with local businesses, or use makerspaces?
Are there grants, sponsorships, or other opportunities we should explore?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you, and we’re excited to contribute to the FRC community.
CNC routers are not particularly expensive anymore. Omio-style machines (sold by WCP, among other places) are commonplace in FRC. We use a ShopBot Desktop MAX for tube and sheet/plate work. We picked it up for $5,000ish on Facebook Marketplace.
I’d highly recommend having a machine in-house that students can operate, rather than relying on outsourcing. Bringing more processes in house means more learning opportunities for the team, shorter lead times, and more opportunity to iterate on designs. We do still outsource work - our steel bellypan, for example, is too large to fit on our router, and steel is much harder than aluminum or polycarbonate to work with. Over the last two years, we’ve added powder coating, CNC routing, laser cutting, and 3D printing to our robots - all of these have massively upped our robot game.
The Omio x8 is $4,000 from WCP. I think that the ShopBot Desktop MAX is better, if you can find one used, but the Omio is super popular. Plan to spend some money on a good shopvac for chip extraction, some random tooling ($200 dollars?), a tube jig ($400 from WCP), and a nice workbench for the machine.
We have access to a shopbot CNC through the school.
I know a local 2 year college invites teams to come to campus and use their equipment and work with instructors and students. That might be an option to explore in your area.
We wrote a grant for a cnc. After a lot of research we went with Shop Sabre 23. A bit more machine than most teams use but it will be shared use and so has to be pretty rugged. Our “pitch” was that it would be used by us, by tech ed students (our shop is actually in the middle school), and for community ed classes. A recent purchase but we already have middle school students able to do basic things…like routered sign that says “Thank You” to the community foundation that funded the project. Oh, and we just donated it to the school district. It’s not as if we’d ever haul it away if we moved, and its good will at a bargain price. DM if you want details on how we pulled this off and what the apparent and actual costs were.
I will absolutely second the recommendation for an Omio x8 2200L-USB, they are great CNC machines and very good for relatively inexperienced machinists, which students are likely to be. Definitely get the tube jig and don’t neglect some kind of enclosure for the whole thing for when it’s operating, both for mess and as an additional safety measure (you can build one like we did or buy one, but you will want it.) When we bought ours back in 2021 from Swyft Robotics (in time for the 2022 season) it really upped our ability to turn out complex mechanisms. Getting the ability to machine in house meant that we could iterate much faster and do much more. Because we could machine the parts, we were able to redesign our shooter in the week between our first and second competitions and go on to win our first blue banner on the strength of the redesigned shooter. We couldn’t have done any of that if we’d had to send out to have parts machined for us.
As far as paying for a CNC goes, that’s where we hit up a grantor. Because of what they do, Gene Haas Foundation loves to help FIRST teams acquire CNC equipment, though if you get a grant from them, you can’t use it to buy Haas equipment (not that most of us would anyway since we don’t need an industrial-sized machine.) We got a $4000 grant from Haas that covered most of the cost. Just be up front with them about what you want to do and why (i.e., you want to purchase a CNC machine in order to better train your students on machining and manufacturing techniques.) It’s a bit late for getting a grant for this season, but you can likely have it by next season along with the CNC it will buy.
We own an Omio X8 2220 and it has provided so much value to out team. The ability to iterate overnight or in under a day provides so much utility, especially for newer or rookie teams (I would say like us but we’re just washed). If you have the money, I cant recommend anything more: cots will only get you so far.
Pandamaniacs has had easy access to two kinds of CNC: 3D printing and, like others, a CNC router in the shop. The former is incredibly easy to acquire, and can act as a cover for the latter.
The router has been owned by the team since 2021. Lately we’d been using my Bambu P1P for more printing as the in-house Ender 3 was slow and frustrating, but there’s a Bambu A1 replacing it for 2025.
We got a grant from the local education foundation to get the router; we got lucky that we knew someone selling their personal one under the grant amount.
But also, consider parts houses like SendCutSend or Fabworks or perhaps a local sponsor. The lack of capital outlay to get it going may well be what suits you better, especially as a new team.
I believe the key difference is “it’s already landed in the United States, and WCP is US-based and may already be in your school’s vendor list”. US shipping from Omio direct adds $667 to the tab (so you’re already around $3500), and I won’t pretend to know enough about the customs charges.
Buying direct from the factory is (or might) be the cheapest option. But. You are the importer and responsible for any fees or tariffs. Dealing with international shipping including longer shipping times. For warranty issues you have to deal with the factory and international shipping for replacement parts. Buying from swift robotics or WCP you are dealing with domestic companies. Having said that, we bought ours direct and had no issues.
You also have other start up costs: Tooling, router bits, collets, etc. a control computer for the MACH3 software. A cutting tool cooling solution (compressed air and or a mister). A sturdy work table. Machine guarding. (OSHA technically requires full guarding) which also helpful keeping the chips in place. Whether or not OSHA regulations apply in your situation is debatable.
We payed no customs charges for ours. I think it was somewhat misclassified and customs just didn’t look at it that closely. Customs is always a dart board. The problem is things can get hung up and delayed without good solutions. Without getting political, thing may change with the next administration and tariffs.
Hello @kaympe ! Welcome to the FRC Community. We hope your year for preparation goes incredibly smoothly. We are a rookie team that had a similar operation plan: wait a year, prepare resources, and ensure our participation for the next season. We also have the same mission: provide accessible robotics!!!
When preparing for this season, our team prioritized manufacturing capabilities to ensure that we wouldn’t be limited in our design options. However, we are unable to host a CNC in our own school due to their size. Therefore, we had to get creative. Out-sourcing is the best option we have as rookies. Our biggest selling point was our name: SCRAP. Many companies reached out to us, willing to give us metal and polycarbonate for manufacturing. We also have an amazing sponsor who has reached out and offered to cut parts for our team (so long as we provide them the design files.)
The easiest thing we found was “explaining our story.” As a fellow rookie team, we didn’t have a following or reputation to use. Therefore we made it. We made posts in our community (Facebook, flyers, newsletters, etc.) explaining who we are, what we need, and scaled our needs to be reasonable, so anyone can help out regardless of the quantity. This was a huge success for us!
In the future, we are looking towards providing manufacturing capabilities natively in our shop. Many of the options in this thread are great examples if your shop/school/space can hold it.
If interested, our team would love to talk to yours and explain our processes, how we approached this challenge, and what the results of it were.
As a new team, not knowing your space and resources constraints, I’d ask whether a CNC is critical, do you have other more fundamental resources in place?
You can build a robot without a CNC, esp with currently available COTS. You can (at least for now) source out plates to be cut through outside services. Don’t get me wrong, a CNC is great, but it may not be a priority for a first year team?
We bought ours several years ago straight from Omio in China (it was before WCP sold them and Swyft had a long back order at the time). Note that you do end up picking up the international shipping cost, which eats up some of the savings, as well as potentially some import tariffs. It took quite a while to arrive – think it was 6-8 weeks or so.
You do end up with basically the same machine, and all said and done may save a little money. If we had it to do all over, we would buy from WCP or Swyft – mostly to support these US based distributors who are also providing replacement parts availability, accessories, well written English documentation and support, etc…
Overall we have been very happy with the machine. We are trying to figure out how to make enough room in our cramped shop for another!
We don’t have a CNC and have, for a few years, used sendcutsend.com . Their prices are reasonable, and their turnaround time is pretty good. Only caveat is that if you do something large (a bellypan, for example), then it ships ground and that can take a while, which slows down build.
Sendcutsend will also do various finish steps like bending parts – a lot of teams have CNCs, but fewer have sheet metal brakes and even fewer have a way to do precise bends.
The other thing is that starting to use a CNC is a non-trivial task. If you wanted to use your own CNC during the upcoming season, July would have been a great time to get it.
