Building your playing field....and how long it takes
 

well i started building my playing field one night out of super glue and tooth picks. and that didn't work out to well. so i went to the meeting the next night, with my tooth picks. then i used the hot glue gun wooot.and well its kinda hard after only making 3 tetras' then i ran out my mother the next day went to party city. and well after that im never trusting her with tooth picks again. she bought me single packaged tooth picks. PACKED ONE BY ONE!! so unpacking all of them was very long especually 1000 of them! so next time you go out and buyt tooth picks. by then unraped....and saying that i have to go hot glue the rest of the tooth picks. :cool: :cool: :cool: squee:setting people on fire is wrong!!

Re: Building your playing field....and how long it takes
 

Get some 1 1/4" PVC and caps and build real ones!

Re: Building your playing field....and how long it takes
 

darn caps....i already bought all the ones a few of the local home depots had....and OMG the lowes caps are different.....grrrrr

I wish I could get some caps to buid real ones. ;)

If we could find ALL the supplies we needed I imagine it would be up in a day, but unfortunately I live in the real world where home depot decide to only stock 40 end caps.....who needs less than 12 end caps? not me....jeez

Home Depot get it together....seriously

Re: Building your playing field....and how long it takes
 

Re: Building your playing field....and how long it takes
 

yeah p.s. we kinda didn't have the PVC pipes yet and besides were only using it for strategies. and its mini so we can bring it any where.

Re: Building your playing field....and how long it takes
 

hehe, you know people do buy a couple of end caps at a time sometimes :P (i work in a builders merchants). Plenty of them over the pond here lol. Bit far for a a few end caps for you guys though

Re: Building your playing field....and how long it takes
 

We have run into the same problem, we have bought all the caps that the Home Depot has. We have gone to 3 or 4 different stores in the area and they have ran out...

Re: Building your playing field....and how long it takes
 

After running to Home Depot for some missing pieces, our team just finished building our first Tetra tonight! It took us about half an hour of build time. The Tetra is actually pretty cool, a little larger and heavier than you'd expect, but cool nonetheless. Fairly strong if you super glue the PVC pipes.

BTW. Use gumdrops instead of hot glue. It goes faster and you'll have a mock field to work with in under half an hour. And if you have trouble with people eating them, dip the gumdrops in Tabasco sauce. :D

Re: Building your playing field....and how long it takes
 

Re: Building your playing field....and how long it takes
 

Three topics:

1) re: parts for practice fields. The shortage of endcaps to build tetras can be remedied by a) drilling holes through the PVC and "tieing" the ends together with nylon tie-wraps or b) there are national plumbing wholesalers (e.g. www.ferguson.com) that have bath showrooms in most cities. They have large quantities of endcaps in their distribution centers for delivery within a couple of days

2) I have uploaded under "white papers" two Powerpoint files that can be used for "war chart" strategy planning. One is meant to be copied at Kinko's wide-format so you can make tetras out of soda straws and paperclips to get a feel for the field in action.

3) I find the signatures of some submitting members in this forum to be very offensive.....Enough said.

Re: Building your playing field....and how long it takes
 

well often though you don't have to build the entire field...i know there are some teams like mine that can't. truely you can just build the parts you need not everything. this year is different a bit not many different parts.

there are always ways to improvise. i think we all will be buying out our local hardware stores supply of end caps--lol--good luck everyone finishing up the tetras

Re: Building your playing field....and how long it takes
 

well we finally got the pvc tetra's it took like 20 min to make one small tetra and like 10 for the large one i think i wasn't really paying much attention. :]

Re: Building your playing field....and how long it takes
 

We're just building a center goal, regular goal, vision tetra, and a few regular tetras to test. We went to get supplies at 1 AM in the morning at our locking after kick off, unfortudently Toledo, OH lacks 24 hour home deports and lowes, so our coach got some the next day and we built them at practice the following Monday.

Re: Building your playing field....and how long it takes
 

We use the field for visualization for strategy and testing with our robot/prototypes within the first few days after the kickoff. We have an excellent parent team that has our field built by the end of kick off day or the following day. It helps a TON when deciding on mechanisms, calculating weights what not

Re: Building your playing field....and how long it takes
 

We have a PVC tetra and the center goal done ourselves. We even had a nifty way of making more clovers... Lexan. It works great, and looks pretty cool from afar, like the pipes are just magically connected there.