What you find in the shop

[quinxorin]

A few of us on my team just spent nine and a half hours cleaning our shop, and we found some pretty interesting items. Here's a short list.

One inch thick polycarbonate sheet. 3/8" is bulletproof.
A pneumatic valve operated via foot pedal
A 1-1/2" ID brass bushing
A pair of resistors - 2 inches in diameter
3 1ft diameter timing pulleys
About a hundred individually packaged 80/20 brackets
An 80/20 door handle
A bag of Cheez-its dated to expire fifteen years ago.What have you guys found in the back corners of your shops?

[Karibou]

A bag of Cheez-its dated to expire fifteen years ago.What have you guys found in the back corners of your shops?

YUM. I've never found anything that old in the shop, but we did find a bag of potato chips stored on top of one of the pipes that was close to the ceiling of our machine room. One of our machinists was fond of storing food there, apparently.

Last time we really cleaned out the shop was when we moved to the other school in our district from the one we had been based out of since the start of the team. We found several things with our old (circa 2003) logo, and some old peer awards. There was also a lot of "so THAT'S where that went!" We also found a bag of team pins that I think were from 2005 or earlier.

[Andrew Lawrence]

When cleaning out the team's storage bin (which hadn't been touched since the first diode), we found an old sofa and a working refrigerator.

[Chris is me]

I'd pay you a good chunk of money for the 1 inch sheet.

[Tom I]

We found Igus energy chain... 1 foot wide links, total length of like 8 feet!! Let's put it this way, this is the stuff that runs along one of these puppies! (http://www.goldcoasthilift.com/images/600S_telescopic_boom_lift_Medium_Picture.jpg)

We also found some 1' lexan and a 6' length of 2" diameter acrylic cylinder.

and in the theme of nasty food-stuffs, one year we found a carton of milk on one of the high shelves... or at least we think it was originally milk...

A clean mech shop is a happy mech shop!!

[Garrett.d.w]

Our old cart (which everybody hated) "disappeared" one night when the mentors weren't looking. Needless to say, whoever inherits the portable after us will be haunted by the yellow tubing that inhabits all of the weird corners of the portable.

On the discusting side... one of our programmers found his 3 year old stash of Taco Bell hot sauce stuffed in one of the computers. We also found a box of what vaguely resembled bagels molding in the back room.

[~Cory~]

We found a set of 30 cold cathode tubes. Neon lightening anyone? We also found some really awesome high voltage power supplies...

[PayneTrain]

I found an old tub of 2000-2007 team records (photos, newspaper clippings, minutes from meetings, infrastructure information) and it's been a personal treasure trove of mine.
We also found the remnants of our 2006 robot, meaning we have about half of 2000, 2003b, 2006, and 2007, most of 2001, 2009, 2010, and 2011. Unfortunately no signs of life from 2002 (I.T.) 2004 (Rising) or 2005 (TryForce). Thankfully all of 2008 is strangely missing, save the bloody hoop...

The DILIH drive system we found on 2006 (Pi) has gotten the team interested in pneumatically-actuated drive train functions (though we think our results will be a little less... primitive).