[Muffinz]

My family and I built the field for my old team this past weekend, it took 1 sheet of 1/2" plywood, 3 sheets of 3/4" plywood, and probably 10-15 2X4's

We made some adjustments to the truss and the high goal.

The truss we created is only 8ft long, no need for a 26" truss...

The High goal that FIRST wants teams to make is not safe in our opinions so we added extra supports along the back and the sides.

We are fortunate enough to have a master craftsman in the family and he pointed out numerous flaws in the designs first gave out.

1. When laminating the the plywood together be sure to use ample wood glue. the glue is what gives the field elements strength. We chose to couple that with 1 1/2" staples.

2. On the high goal and the low goal the spec calls for you to drill into the side of the laminated plywood, we would highly recommend you do not do this, it yield no strength and will just split the wood and make more prone to break and hurt a person standing by it.

3. Don't build the truss supports the way they have them shown, once again we found that they are crap, the way FIRST has you assemble them terrible. We decided to just use 2 4X4's as each support/pylon.

4. Brace that high goal... it isn't safe to build it the way they have it. We chose to do two things. The first being we ran a long piece of plywood along the back where the lower support connects the the actual goal. We used 3 inch nails which insures it isnt going anywhere. We also added two 12' 2X4's running from the top of the goal to the horizontal support pieces on the ground making one big triangle.

We had very little waste so make sure if you buy this amount of material you map out your cutlist before cutting your plywood.

Good Luck