What does your team use to make the clovers for tetras?

[Gabriel Mendez]

We used 1/8 lexan it flexed pretty well, no need for heat gun nor propane torch.

[Cyberguy34000]

We tried making the center Tetra by using only the clover leaves included with the kit. We wanted to see if we could save some time by not machining out the parts in the manual. Wow was that was flimsy . So then we thought that aluminum might be stronger, so we rebuilt everything with the plastic clover leaves doubled up with a aluminum cloverleaf cutout. It helped a bit but not enough, so then we added aluminum braces and the thing was fine .


But anyways... Aluminum is an excellent substitute, just make sure to round off the edges or duct tape them so they aren't too sharp

[DaSpyder]

we used three button backs and pop riveted them together into a trianglular shape. works pretty good and bends pretty good.

[Bcahn836]

We also did ours out of vinyl siding but we didn't have enough so we used the linoleum flooring stuff, works very well and is easy to manipulate

[falconmaster]

1/8 inch clear lexan works for us too!!

[dvd_hawk]

Originally Posted by Tigerlily-87

I'm just curious...we only got a few of the clover connecters in our kit, so we needed to make some more. We made some temporary ones out of cardboard and duct-tape , but only until we could find something better.

Does anyone have any other ideas for what we can effectively make them out of?

our team has used aluminum an thick lexan

[Damian Manda]

We used LDPE cut with out laser engraver/cutter. This only works marginally though, as the plastic likes to remelt behind the area that had just been cut. It also warped a lot when making a large sheet of them, so we could not do the second pass to make them actually cut out, and then had to break them out like an ice cube tray. Still, we were able to make about 40 of them in about an hour (most of which was taken up by the cutting process). If you dont have a laser cutter, this is irrelevant though.

I want to try lexan, as that cuts much more cleanly, but I think we have enough until some break.

I am interested to know if anyone has cut them with a water jet, as that might work better than the laser.

[Bharat Nain]

Double Cardboard.. it worked fine.

[Adam Richards]

Thick rubber. Bends easily, maintains it's shape, and it's durable!

[Collmandoman]

We used the highway robbery $15 sets from Innovation First. scamed =/
but they are nice

[Tsom467]

We used 1/4" Lexan. We had one of our students draw the clover in Autocad, then used our (new) CNC Milling machine to mill out the clovers. The it was lots of blood (literally!) and sweat as we bent them into tetras. Made 1 yesterday, 9 today. My and an engineer/mentor's hands are all cut up! But they're built.

[NoodleKnight]

Lexan, yeah you probably get the point by now. But I was thinking, if you happen to have a lot of hot glue sticks standing around, you could probably have your buddies hold the tetra together then you can just stick everything with lots of hot glue -- like use a propane torch and hold the sticks with metal tongs... just a thought

[dez250]

Ive found a pretty easy way to make them cheaply.

While walking through the paint aisle at Home Depot today my eye was caught by a shelf display of bucket lids. These lids are made for buckets from like 5" to over a foot in diameter. The larger ones are 1/4" HDPE and the smaller ones are 1/8" LDPE. The nice thing is i was able to just trace more or less the whole clover on the lid and cut it out with scissors. Since it is a little flimsy i decided to do two clovers per corner. The lids i used were for 8" diameter buckets and were 48 cents each. Hope this helps you out.

[dhitchco]

Elsewhere in this forum was a discussion about using plastic tie-wraps as the corner connectors especially for the goals; not the movable tetras.

Just drill holes through the ends of the goal pieces, thread a long nylon tie-wrap strap but leave them loose. Once the entire goal is put together, you can "cinch-up" the nylon tie wraps to make the structure rigid.

That way, you save the cost of the PVC end caps (which seem to be in short supply) plus you have less labor to assemble and a lot less time to dis-assemble when done.

[Whiteviper]

lexan works great, but make sure when you buy the caps you get flat ones, we just got some rounded ones they still work but not nearly as nice as flat ones in the kit.