Hello Tony,
My experience has been that communication is absolutely vital for success in your job. To this end, here are a few suggestions:
1> Get the faculty seriously on your side. To do this you have to get to know them and them, you. You need to be able to sell them on the value of having a really kick ass shop to both further their own ends, and also to enable their students. Perhaps enlist some students to help you make a presentation about the merits of getting a shop done right. This can include researching the projects built by the schools that HAVE good shops.
2. Give Tom Lipton a call, or write a letter. He is "Oxtoolco" on You tube, and has a lifetime of expertise in precision machining while working at Lawrence Berkeley Lab. He seems to be a very generous man, with a strong interest in education. There are a number of internet machinists that you might wish to watch/communicate with. On Youtube, some of these are Keith Fenner (Turnwright machine works), Adam Booth (ABOM79), and many others linked on their shows. Given that your background is not specifically maching, you may wish to educate yourself further. The folks listed above are a good place to start. Prepare to go without sleep a lot! Perhaps you can get Keith Fenner and his friends to help with the limited tools. He does a "What is in your Box" giveaway of a huge toolbox full of machinist specific stuff every now and then. At least enter for either yourself or the shop.
3. Check out Alexander Slocum of PERG (Precision Engineering Research Group) at MIT. His website is
http://pergatory.mit.edu/index.html. The MIT student shop is at
Student Shops | Edgerton Center. Take a while to dig around in his website. In particular, look closely at the presentations and papers in this link:
http://web.mit.edu/2.75/fundamentals/FUNdaMENTALS.html. Now, Slocums group is a high level university research group, but he has always struck me as the sort of person who loved shops. If you have a friendly professor in the ME department, perhaps you can discuss with him the HUGE!!!! value that a good shop would make to his efforts and show him Slocum's site. It is to everyone's advantage for your shop to be a very good one. You just need to educate people in the department.
4. Get the mill off that (steel) 2x4! that is NOT how you raise a machine tool.
5.Drill presses encourage students to get trips to the hospital with blood and gore and missing parts. Someone will INEVITABLY try to use one with an end mill in it. Never leave a tool with drills or end mills or whatever in the chuck. Or a lathe chuck with the key in it...
6. Make some field trips to local machine shops. Perhaps readers on this site can suggest some good ones. Some of them will look at you like you came from Mars, but others will succomb to your boyish good looks and charm. In any case, solicit them for materials, old but usable tools, vises, etc. often they have drops they would be willing to give you. Perhaps they will give tours to your students.Find the metals suppliers, both new and scrap, in your area and inquire if you can get discounts for the university. Won't happen if you don't ask! Visit the faculty office and find out how to allow people to get a deduction on their taxes for donating things, and discuss with the faculty and the administration what sort of things they will allow to be donated. There are probably rules. Know them and make it EASY for people to donate. Enlist some students to help. Make a flyer about your new/old shop and your plans to make it bigger and better. Start a website for the shop. USE STUDENTS! It gets them involved and they make websites like I eat ibuprofen.
7. You probably have a budget, but make a request for decent measuring and hand tools for you as the supervisor. Then order a bunch of micrometers, Mitutoyo digital calipers, depth gauges, gauge blocks, gauge pins, parallels, squares, indicators, thread gauges, feeler gauges, and so on. Keep them in a LOCKED cabinet. Otherwise they WILL get used as doorstops or go missing. You can do amazing things with EBAY. Work with the administration on how to use EBAY to get stuff for the shop. You need to have some sort of direct purchasing power (with the accompanying headache of documentation, sigh...). Lobby the administration HARD to allow you (and fund) putting Digital Readouts) on the mill and the lathe. I use Newall in my shop and like it (and have installed them myself on my various tools), but there are other vendors. Hit them up for a university donation or discount. If there are a few students catching fire about a machine shop, get some of them to help refurbish the mill. H&W Machine will supply any part for the mill. Ask for a discount. They are nice people. Maybe it will work. If not refine your sob story for the next vendor. Repeat until they give you twice as much as you ask for... Hahaha.....
8. After you resolve the donations issue, contact toolvendors (end mills, turning tools, boring heads, etc, etc) and give them a pitch. I bet you will get some good stuff. Be sure to tell them what sort of stuff you have, or else they may send some great 2" shank end mills you cannot use.
9. CNC is everyone's favorite thing. All the kiddies desperately want to learn it. I SUGGEST humbly that you develop a MANUAL machining course, with making an assembly of some sort from a toleranced drawing of the parts (made using mill, lathe, hand files, etc) as an exam that has to be passed (i.e hit the tolerances and assemble the thing) before they even TOUCH the CNC tools. CNC does not (arguably- let the flames begin) teach you how machine tools work, how to measure things, how to use hand tools, how to read drawings, how to understand at a visceral level feeds and speeds, and what good chips look like, and what a tool sounds like when it is in distress, and a million other fundamental things that all old timers know as well as breathing, and which form the basis for any good machinist's knowledge base, CNC or manual.
10. Get a good notebook to keep track of things. I use quardille ruled ones 8 1/2" by 11" from National, but use whatever works for you. You will find it invaluable for keeping track of shop needs, issues, people's phone numbers, and a million other things. For a scientist they are as necessary as air, but for your job, perhaps not as familiar. Still VERY useful for staying organized. Having a cup of coffee and writing a list in a notebook, or sketching a new gizmo is very satisfying.
11.
Get the faculty on your side as active partners!!!! This is absolutely crucial to getting resources, and with political support you can flourish. Without it, not so much. As a practical person, the communication, faculty tickling, donation asking, paperwork for donation generating, etc stuff may seem ugly and not in your wheelhouse. I ASSURE you that it is often ugly, but if it is NOT part of your way of doing business, you will have a tough time getting more than you have now. I have deep personal experience with a number of university machine shops, and can tell you that it is NEVER easy to get what you need. With a few professors rabidly on your side, good things WILL happen. Sad but true... Look carefully at the link I sent to the MIT shops. These are about the best that university shops get, although I am sure there are many others of similar quality. Something to aspire to, and a good bait for the professors. "Just imagine, Professor X, what a cool robot/car/spacecraft/yournamehere your students could make if ONLY we had a shop like THIS!!"
Anyway, I could go on for hours. Try to stay visible here on PM and solicit opinions and contributions, advice and encouragement. If you can keep anyone from getting injured, I think you will get great satisfaction and joy from this new job. Just remember the old adage: "It is impossible to make anything foolproof, because fools are so damn ingenious". This applies double to students!
Best wishes,
Michael