My name's Paul and I'm a mentor for the Lee's Summit North High School FIRST Robotics Competition team, The Broncobots, out of Lee's Summit, Missouri. To learn more about the team, check out the website as that is a post all on its own: www.teambroncobots.com.
One tidbit I'll mention is the robotics team is a 501c3 non-profit. We are given a build site by our school district, but the team otherwise receives no direct funding from the school. The team stays afloat through sponsors, fundraisers, and grants.
Through a fellow mentor, the team had a connection to the Brunson Instrument Company who very generously donated our newest machine, a 1996 vintage Bridgeport Torq-Cut 22 VMC. This post is my way of showcasing the work that we put in to breathe new life into this old production machine prior to the robotics team using it.
In late August, after nearly 6 months of waiting, we were given the green light to move the machine out of the caves that are home to Bruson Instruments. Since rigging companies are expensive, we originally thought we would transport the machine ourselves with a pickup and trailer; however, weighing in at 6500lbs, plus the forklift that would would be necessary to load the machine, we decided it easiest and safest to hire a semi that could haul both together. We got the the logistics figured out and set the move date to be September 15th, 2017.
The day came and several Broncobot mentors met up at Brunson. We rented a forklift from a nearby company, moved the machine outside, and loaded it onto the landoll trailer.
Some backstory on this machine - It was made about 1996, Brunson purchased it new, and it was used in a production environment in various capacities up until about 2015 to machine stainless steel. As best as we can tell, when it was removed from production it was simply unplugged and placed in a corner - the machine was left with all the coolant and stainless shavings covering every visible surface inside the cabinet. I didn't take nearly enough "before" pictures to capture the condition it was in… just know that it was disgusting.
Due to a parade at the high school, and so we would have daylight, we left the machine on the truck overnight and met to move it into our robotics shop the following day, a Saturday morning.
Once it was in the shop myself and other mentor, Joshua (jgwentworth96), took lead to make this machine ours over the coming months. We knew we wanted to paint some parts of it, especially after seeing the old paint falling away and some surface rust, but we found that it was going to take a lot more than just some paint. The day we set it in the shop I used a combination of putty knives, an electric power washer, and rags to start to clean things out. We very quickly determined that this wasn't going to be enough. There were chips in every crevice, a green algae of sorts had made a home in the upper portion of the cabinet... it was bad.
If we were going to do this, we had to go all out and do it right, so we determined that the enclosure had to come off.
Due to schedules, Joshua and I could only work on this on weekends, and since we still had regular team meetings throughout the week we had to clean up most of our mess at the end of every weekend.
The next weekend, with the help of a few friends and a Dingo we separated the enclosure from the machine, took it outside, and went crazy with a high power gas pressure washer. We washed every surface we could, trying to get years of chips and grime out of the machine as best as we could.
Once we had power washed the enclosure and the panels we brought everything back inside and started sanding all the parts to prep for primer. After we were sufficiently happy with the metal we set up our "paint booth" for the first time. We knew from the start that we wanted to paint the interior of the cabinet white to reflect as much light as possible, and on the outside we wanted to do grey and red in some fashion. For those curious, we used Rustoleum enamel paints for the white and red. Rustoleum enamels are premixed, and we didn't like their grey's, for that we used an outdoor enamel paint and mixed up the grey from the Broncobots team logo. About 90% of all of the painting was airless, hence the need for an enclosed booth, with some painting being done with an HVLP, brush, and spray paint.
The airless sprayer, while a major pain to clean on its own, with oil based paints was awful. Of course, that could have been because half the time I was cleaning it at 1am or 2am and just wanted to be done. Ultimately, the airless made easy work of getting in all of the crevices and getting a nice uniform coat on everything.