Post Your Workshop pic/s

FIRST General Forum
1

Hello,

So, now that our 2016 official FRC season is over we are finally doing some much needed space overhauls.

I realized there was no thread like this here and thought it might be fun!

Ill give some info on our workshop/room/workspace/ect in a second but, first I would like to give some info on what I think this thread can/should be.

Everyone should post 1 - 3 pictures of their space with a small or large :wink: blurb about it.

Without further ado I will show off our current space.
http://imgur.com/wCMowjt

The top of the pic shows the view from the main hallway. Where as the one on the bottom shows it from where the robot is.

We are very lucky to have the entire room dedicated to us, and right now it is in our “Practice” configuration. You may notice the 3 large tables in the back. Essentially when we need to work we fold all of them down creating tons of workspace. And, when we need to practice we fold them up while still having a little bit of workspace in the form of the 3 tables on the left of the room.

Right now we are working with our school district to expand the space.
You may notice the doors in all 4 corners of the room. Luckily those all lead to another room. The one to the left when you walk in is a small closet (Used to be a very small bathroom with a toilet and urinal (Sink was outside)) that will be turned into raw materials storage. The room to the right is fairly large and will be turned into a computer lab for CAD and programming. The room to the left in the back is also fairly large and will be turned into a storage area and clean assembly area. The room to the left in the back is a garage which will be our machining room. It will house all the large tools you see in the pictures along with a Manual Mill and, hopefully a CNC router. The main room will then house a 1/2 field, projector + Smart board and, a few small tables. We do not have full confirmation that we can get these spaces (They are currently filled with computer trash waiting to be recycled) but, we are hopeful.

Now enough about my teams space lets hear about yours :wink:

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Does any of that computer “trash” happen to be for sale? :smiley:

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Currently it’s way more messy but here’s our workshop! (Notice the pinball machine in the back, it’s awesome :slight_smile: )…

4

We definitely had to get creative for this first year. Our community team met in multiple places.

Our local library has been a fantastic sponsor, offering us the use of their multipurpose community room. It is a great classroom with two projectors, tables and chairs. We used it in the off season for team building, brainstorming, workshops, open houses, fabrication of a KOP drive train - anything that involved only hand tools and not making a lot of noise or a lot of mess. We were even able to stretch that a little bit when they offered the use of the room for drive practice - did you know that plywood defenses leave splinters all over the place? :ahh:

Our second partnership was with the community recreation complex. They offered us access to the upstairs lobby area, overlooking the swimming pool and the fitness centers. We turned this into open, classroom style space for software, business, and some drivetrain work. Downstairs, in a storage area behind the gymnasiums, they gave us the use of a 6’x10’ storage cage where we kept all our tools and robot parts, and the use of the rest of the back area to do fabrication work and set up our bench tools: a drill press, a miter saw, and a compressor.

Finally, one of our mentors got us access to a company lounge in the building he works at, giving us another space where we could work on the robot or the software, with 24/7 availability. As Bag and Tag approached, we started working at the recreation complex, and when they closed at 10pm, we moved everything here for late night assembly, wiring, and testing sessions.

We became very good at packing up the essential tools and bringing them to one of these areas for practices and work sessions. One fun side effect was the amount of attention we gathered as folks doing their workouts, or kids coming for tae kwon doe lessons, would watch us progress and cheer us on from week to week.

While we are extremely grateful to all of our sponsors, we are hoping to find something a little more permanent that we can settle into and set up some shop/storage space!

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The shop

The mills are next to the car and upstairs.
Make yourself at home.

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You have the Best space :slight_smile: EVER!!!

7

Not bad for a small space! Nice pinball!

8

I note, with some chagrin, that your build space looks a lot like my basement…

No, guys, no. Not happening! :yikes:

9

It’s been on our to-do list for a while to start an FRC Cribs style blog series talking about team shops. If someone else wants to take that on feel free, I think it could be really useful for the community.

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Here’s where we build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GhRCL1eLWw

11

1511 has had many different setups in our 12 years of FIRST. We’ve become increasingly good at morphing into the various rooms at our school that fit our needs throughout the year (still no place we can leave a full field up all year though :rolleyes: )

Cafeteria: Large scale team meetings, strategy and design brainstorming, where we setup field parts and carpet for driver practice.

ComputerLabs: We utilize two computer labs. One is a general purpose “noisy” room and one is used for programming, CAD, or integration meetings and is typically far quieter.

Shop

[quote][/quote]

: The action room where dreams are made. Also tubes from 2011 and one blue banner from 2005 for some reason.

PHS is very generous with the time/space they allow (and we feed the janitors, so they don’t mind).

12

This is our shop as of this year, so much is new.



And the most important part of the shop, the Shop Doge!!!

Please let me know if you have any questions about our shop, how we run it, how we got it, or if you want more detailed pictures

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I like the floor. It gives it a bit of a retro look. The shop doge is a good idea; you just need a concession stand!

14

Woah that’s a lot of Mills.

15

Scary thing is that we have had all 5 in use at least twice this season, gives me the warm fuzzies inside seeing so many of our machines in use. Especially after all the work we put into cleaning and upgrading them over the summer and off season.

16

Here’s the latest panoramic of our workshop I can find, from the end of August. It is a “portable” temporary building on campus, located right here (the middle of the five small buildings).

We rearranged a bit in November, moving the portable shelving units to the panelled wall to the left, and the green workbench/storage box to the right of the 'bright" window. It’s much smaller than the classroom we were working in our first four years, but we don’t have to set it back up as a classroom at the end of each build session, which is both a blessing and a curse (especially the days before bag and tag when housekeeping was put way on the back burner).

We have a 12 foot built-in rack for metal, wood, and PVC stock, a 2’x4’ freestanding 5-shelf unit without wheels, two 16" x 48" shelf units with wheels, an approx 15 drawer toolchest, two storage workbenches, two 4’x6’ workbenches, two 3’x5’ workbenches, and a couple of old desks for computer programming, as well as a freestanding drill press.

We also (this year at least) had a half-covered concrete pad behind the classroom where we built last year, (100 ft SSW of the workshop) where we do most of our saw, grinder, and large projects like building defenses and pit displays. We keep these tools on a cart which stows to the right of the position where the photo was taken.

It slopes about five degrees towards the back

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Here’s our build space today right before our final unbag period. It is a classroom in our school, which we share with a teacher.

Since there are classes in this room during the school day, we need to stuff everything into our very messy back closet (the second picture), which we also share with the teacher and an art teacher in the adjoining room. Like GeeTwo mentioned, this forces us to clean up, but also is somewhat annoying. Over February vacation, we didn’t have to clean up, so the room became catastrophically messy.

Our practice area (not shown), is a carpeted meeting area in the center of the middle school wing, which is also in use during the day.

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18

Three years this is what our shop looked like. It was a 20 foot shipping container with about 1/3rd being used for storage. We were able to field an Einstein caliber robot with what we had in there. It wasn’t easy, but we never settled for good enough.

Our bench grinder wasn’t even inside, poor thing was bolted to a broken table outside under the eaves. It has a much nicer home now and doesn’t need to worry about being stolen anymore.

In fall of 2013 we got a Bridgeport mill and a Harbor Freight lathe(not shown) and wired our crate up with 3-Phase power via a $300 extension cable 50 foot long to plug into the classroom. We split the phases off to 3 circuits, one for north outlets, one for south, one for the switchable overhead lights, and all 3 going to the Bridgeport at the back of the crate.

Even our shop last year and our meeting space were tiny and ill equipped compared to what we have now. But we only have it because of our persistence with the school and our eternal vigil on Craigslist hunting for good deals.

I really do miss being able to tell people we work out of a shipping container, it’s really far more inspiring to people. I suppose that’s the march of progress however.

19

I’ve been trying to figure out if local building code will allow me to construct a building with single story sections made out of shipping containers joined by a central structure. Specifically so that if I need to move any part of it one can back up a truck.

Handy if they raise my property taxes :yikes:.
Leave behind the small central structure with roof and concrete floor like a gazebo in a field.

20

That actually seems like a really good idea. Luckily the weather will hold up for you guys most likely. Most of our build season we are battling snow. Every once in awhile we can open the garage door but that has only been the past few weeks.