We have a couple of sponsors that might be willing to make us a fully-decked-out workshop, however, I know nothing of what we would need, so any ideas would be much appreciated!
And by tools, I mean big tools, like a laser cutter and stuff like that.
(Also, obviously this wouldn’t be just for our team, it would be for all the teams around us that are willing to come and work there)
Hey- I’ve just gotta say I’m super super impressed with the commitment to the new team. Serious congrats.
I’d highly recommend a Bambu of some sort. I’ll let some 3D printing nerds hash out which one. But I believe we have the top of the line Carbon X1s and they are beautiful and haven’t seen any issues. Great for high throughput and low maintenance.
As for a laser cutter we have loved our glowforge.
Make sure to get a band saw, drill press, belt sanders, and other basics, as they will be your most used tools.
A CNC will likely be one of your most used tools. I highly recommend one. We have an X-Carve. A very good, easy machine. Lots of workspace, though we have had some small reliability issues.
If you’re really going for it I’ve always wanted a water cutter in our shop- but also- that’s likely outside of your scope and I’d recommend many other machines first
We have two CNC machines, a shopbot 4x8 router and an omio x8 2200L. Would highly recommend the omio, but I think the shopbot is largely overkill due to its high cost and the fact that it eats up a lot of space. We have a laser cutter but find we don’t use it often, it gets used for students’ class projects more than it is used for our team. We machine most of our box tube on a Bridgeport manual mill, but I don’t think that’s strictly necessary (although it is the machine I most enjoy using). Definitely get Bambu X1Cs. Multiple of them would really make printed parts so simple
I am going to echo everyone else, CNCs, lasers, and 3d printers are very useful, especially during prototyping and final fabrication as they could double maybe triple the speed of making parts for your robot, I would personally suggest also getting bandsaws and drill presses since everything can’t be made with a CNC.
A key item on the bandsaw: DON’T get one designed for wood! They go waaaaay too fast.
Grainger has a Dayton two speed benchtop that is about the cheapest one that sorta goes at Aluminum speed.
What you really want is a proper metal cutting bandsaw. These will have some kind of two step pulley and/or gear reduction to get slow enough. Set it up for Aluminum or steel and leave it. The kids will cut plastic and wood on it and it will do that just fine. Just slower than if you adjusted the blade speed! BUT, with the slow blade speed you won’t instantly destroy the blade when a kid puts steel on it.
Also, get fine toothed blades. I haven’t had good luck finding proper bi-metal blades in really fine. Oddly enough, the carbon steel blades on slow speed work shockingly well, and happily eat sheet metal.
Blade welders are super cool and make your blades cheaper (buy it by the roll), but there’s a significant learning curve!
We purchased this Dake earlier this year. Super happy with it so far. Much better than the Harbor Freight bandsaw we had before. Main reason we bought this one was it could do miters and could be used either vertical or horizontal. It also has a DC drive so the speeds are infinitely variable without the need for belt changes.
Besides what other posters have mentioned, I suggest a manual lathe. It does not have to be large; 7"x14" is plenty, and 3494 uses a highly modified 4.5"x9.75" lathe, which has proven to be pretty much exactly as large as necessary.
I did a bunch of shopping before we bought that one. Some other options which are good out-of-the-box:
LittleMachineShop’s HiTorque 7500 can be used completely manually out-of-the-box because all of the leadscrews and racks are correctly graduated in inches. All of their other models are graduated in inches incorrectly, due to having metric or metric/inch compromise leadscrews and racks. For the models with Digital ReadOuts, this doesn’t really matter.
Manual lathes are really handy tools for making and modifying round parts (which FRC robots have a lot of!), and they’re also great for teaching people that want to use CNC machines. You can get a real feel for how the machine, tool, and part interact, and you can actually watch the chips form in the cut. That’s a great way to give people some intuition about what’s going on under the router spindle.
100% they are quick to learn and can massively expand your manufacturing limits and reduce turnaround times, especially for polycarb parts. If you can, get this and I would say prioritize it.
Couple of reasons there. First, we’ve had the manual machines longer so we’ve been more used to it. We also haven’t had time to make a proper setup for the omio tube fixture. Last year we actually had to cut some spacers for swerve out of a tube and we used a really sketchy setup which I did not enjoy. I also don’t think we have the proper tools to do all the cuts we want, such as precision bearing bores, which we can get much more consistently on our manual mill with a reamer, and since neither of our CNCs have auto tool changers, it’s quite cumbersome to switch tools. We’ve found the CNCs have a surprisingly high runout compared to the mills, but that might also just be a mistake in setup or programming.
How big is your team? 5 people? 25 people? Make sure you have the basics and make sure there is enough. In theory you only need one of anything but it is a team and people want to do stuff. So make sure you have multiple so you can divide and conquer. (It will also make you more productive)