We all know that FIRST gave us some of the supplies to make up one of the tetras, but at $15 a pop for more, plus the cost of PVC, how many teams out there (especially rookie teams) can afford to shell out the money to make up more field pieces?
My team is in exactly that predicament, but we needed to make up some tetras to test our designs on. In steps the Team 134 Thinktank, who came up with the idea of using simple piping hangers to bind the pvc caps. These hangers come in rolls (sorry I didn't get a picture of the roll), but it's what a plumber uses to hang up the copper hot water pipes in your basement. It looks like a strip of metal, about the thickness of a penny and about as wide as a dime, maybe a little less than that. It has holes every so often, big holes, in an alternating pattern of big then small holes. You still need to use pvc and the pvc end caps, but you don't need to spend the $15 for the nylon ends to build the corners.
I bought a couple rolls of this stuff at Home Depot in the Plumbing department for about $1.50 each. If you cut it at about 3", or after 3 big holes, it has just enough room to screw in a bolt at the same length as the distance between the holes in the pvc end caps.
Well, I'll stop blabbering and attach the pictures I took of them.
If you have any trouble at all putting these together or finding the parts, send me an email at
jake.gallagher@gmail.com or send me an IM on AIM at sessofiendjake. Enjoy, and happy stacking!
<edit> We tried making our caps out of the thick lexan, but they ended up snapping a lot, and that's why we went with the plumber's hangers. </edit>