Durability of tetras

[Billfred]

I think that on the grand scale of FIRST gamepieces I've seen, they held up well.

Well, so long as you didn't do anything extreme, like drop them from player-station height or higher.

[Joe J.]

From what I saw the Tetras held up very well. Even when they did break they were at least fixable, unlike the balls last year or the bins back in 03. I hope that next years game pieces will be as durable as the Tetras.

In regards to practice tetras we tried several different cheap clover materials sheet metal was too flexible, Lexan held up but not for long, we finally ended up using some 1/8" Delrin sheet and that seems to be working well.

[Warren Boudreau]

Having worked closely with the tetras (too close) during the Florida Regional, I have to say that the tetras held up pretty well. The clovers could have been designed differently to reduce the stress on them. But, as it was pointed out to me, wouldn't you want the weakest link to be something easy to replace? It would have been much worse if the endcaps or the PVC pipes were the things that broke rather than the clovers.

[pyroslev]

During the build season, I was given the task of fixing tetras that were broken. I would fix one, put it on the station and be given another broken one.

The ones at VCU were somewhat stronger.
However, i saw very few broken tetras on Newton field. One brok cause of a tipped bot crushing it.

[David Brinza]

I served as a volunteer at the SoCal Regional this year performing tetra repair on both days of competition and was dubbed "Dr. Tetra". Woodie autographed my FIRST crew t-shirt right under the Dr. Tetra "insignia" .

FIRST had just acquired new clovers that were punched from colored poly-propylene to replace the thicker low density polyethylene clovers. On Friday, broken tetras came off of the field frequently - sometimes 2 or 3 in a single match. On Saturday, I was joined field-side by my son, Clayton - he had a blast assisting "Dr. Tetra". By time we reached the elimination round, most of the tetras had the newer clovers, which seemed much more durable. In the semifinals and finals, I think there was only one broken tetra is spite of the much more intense play.

I was surprised to see many tetras in Atlanta with the thicker polyethylene clovers, probably something only a tetra repair specialist would notice...

[Cory]

Originally Posted by David Brinza

I served as a volunteer at the SoCal Regional this year performing tetra repair on both days of competition and was dubbed "Dr. Tetra". Woodie autographed my FIRST crew t-shirt right under the Dr. Tetra "insignia" .

FIRST had just acquired new clovers that were punched from colored poly-propylene to replace the thicker low density polyethylene clovers. On Friday, broken tetras came off of the field frequently - sometimes 2 or 3 in a single match. On Saturday, I was joined field-side by my son, Clayton - he had a blast assisting "Dr. Tetra". By time we reached the elimination round, most of the tetras had the newer clovers, which seemed much more durable. In the semifinals and finals, I think there was only one broken tetra is spite of the much more intense play.

I was surprised to see many tetras in Atlanta with the thicker polyethylene clovers, probably something only a tetra repair specialist would notice...

I held the same job as you, at UTC. We had two different clover styles, the original, soft ones, and then the much harder ones. We replaced all the originals with the new ones, which worked out much better.

At SVR, I noticed that a good number of the clovers were very thin compared to the others. They also seemed to be breaking a whole lot more. There was one point where there were around 6+ tetras out of play all being repaired. I imagine the SVR field went to SoCal the next week and you got these tetras.