floor protection
 

Just a quick question. How did you guys protect the floor a little better this year?

There are concerns from the school, and we are trying to figure out a way to cover the floor under the playing field a little better.

Any Ideas? Do you think it will be that bad for the floor for this year's game? Just think of so many robots being tipped over from the ramp.

At IRI, we have traditionally used large gym tarps to cover the floor. We put these under the carpet too. In the area around the ramp, we will probably overlap the tarps to get extra protection.

Having these tarps diminishes the aestetics of the pit areas, but they do provide protection from damaging a nice hardwood gym floor.

Usually the school has some sort of tarp to cover their floor... or another school will be willing to donate a tarp. For IRI, we get tarps from the host gym and from the generous Purdue-West Lafayette HS team to bring tarps.

Andy B.

If I were you, see if you could hunt down some Wrestling Mats. That would probably hold up well against damage.

wrestling matcher are like padded rubber, not gonna hold up well with people in the pits practicing with their robot ;)

Talk to the school. If they hold events in teh gym they should have some type of mat to put down. Thats what are school has but liek to get the maintmence men to do it it cost us 500 bucks cause it takes them 3-4 hours to do it. And if they dont have ti you might be dead in teh water cause replacin gym floor is expensive

Yup, that's exactly the problem we are trying to figure out right now. The High school doesn't have any mats. And renting them are expensive, I heard...

In 1997 we held the West Michigan Invitational in Zeeland High's brand new gym. Everyone was paranoid about us damaging the floor, so we were asked to do this: put down 1 layer of carpet upside down so the "good" side was in contact with the gym floor, then a layer of plywood, then another layer of carpet right side up. It was a pain to set up, but we were pretty confident that there wouldn't be any floor damage. Plus, (if I remember correctly) we got some local stores to "loan" us the bottom layer carpet and plywood since we knew that it would still be in brand new condition when we were done with it.

Um we glued our carpet down to the floor.... Oh wait that is right we don't need to worry about that cause we dont use the school for practice.

Duel on Delaware Floor Covering
 

Last year, we put down 4' x 8' sheets of masonite over the gym floor. For robot paths and walkways, we used a combination of rubber matting (loaned from Team #341) and masonite sheets.

We purchased the masonite sheets from Home Depot. We have them in storage for this year's event. These sheets were also used for Ramp Riot 2002 and the Brunswick Eruption last year. They held up fairly well.

Re: Duel on Delaware Floor Covering
 

That's one of the best parts of having nearby offseason competitions.. All of the teams swap around and share resources. Without that, competitions such as Ramp Riot and the Duel on the Delaware wouldn't be possible.

We um just laid down the carpet and plopped the field on that.............

Good enough for us

Who cares about our high school gym floor anyway?????

It's Lucite... It's the brand name for Acrylic before the patent expired.

Just like Lexan is the brand name for polycarb. When the patent expired other people have to call it polycarb.

As I have been told, Lexan is not a patent, its a brand name/trademark of polycarbonate from General Electric Plastics, polycarbonate is the name of the type of plastic and Lexan is the trade mark of GE.
~Mike