[peronis]

Hi all,

I happened to run across this forum on my search for milling and/or CNC mill machines.

I am a physics teacher, and lead mentor for a FIRST Robotics team. It is our second year after an awesome rookie season. See USFIRST.org if you haven't heard about it. Our team participants in the First Robotics Competition (FRC). We currently have about 45 students on our team ranging from 9-12th grade.

FIRST prides itself on having professional and skilled mentors work along students to help inspire them to pursue careers in science, technology, and engineering.

I am here for basically two things.

1. We are in need of experienced machinists who would be willing to volunteer their time to mentor our team as we work to design, build, program and test our robot during build season. The build season is January 5th through Feb 19th, and we pretty much work after school every day and on Saturdays. Its a 6 week schedule (pretty crazy). We use inventor and solidworks to design and prototype components. Out of the 3000 FIRST teams around the world, most have milling/CNC machines and/or experience with them. This results in amazing looking and functioning machines. We could use the help.


2. All we used last year was an old drill press, band saw, and hand tools to produce our 140lb robot. I would like more information on how to purchase or acquire (through donations) either a regular mill, or CNC machine for our team. We will be fundraising heavily to add this ability to our team. Any information or resources you can share with me about where to start would be amazingly helpful
We primarily use 6061 aluminum for our structure and chassis.


Please let me know if you can help. Thank you so much. Below is a picture of our robot from last year. Also, if you search through pictures of robots on Chief Delphi - Portal you can see some of the precision machining required.