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. 
squee:setting people on fire is wrong!!
Get some 1 1/4" PVC and caps and build real ones!
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
All the Lowes’ here have been raided by another team! Lol.
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.
hehe, you know people do buy a couple of end caps at a time sometimes 
(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
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…
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. 
Yeah, it’s fun funness. We have 3 small tetras and a large tetra. They’re lookin good!
Three topics:
-
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
-
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.
-
I find the signatures of some submitting members in this forum to be very offensive…Enough said.
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
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. :]
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.
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
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.
does anyone know the dimensions of the scoring tetras? i have searched and was only able to find the center goal and regular goal.
Yeah, we’ve made our own clovers also And to answer the previous post…there should be some type of blue prints in your kit…atleast thats what other team members on our team have said.
can i just ask what is lexan?
is it that stuff which you heat and then it can be moulded around things or am i completely wrong?
Yes, it is. Lexan is a brand name for polycarbonate. Which is the kind of sheet plastic commonly found on FIRST robots. Acrylic plastic is also used but not as desirable because when it breaks it usually shatters.
One person (igrowrobots) asked on Friday about the dimensions of the tetras.
Hopefully you found the official answer by now, but if not, they’re 2’6" on an edge. The official drawing of a tetra is located HERE on the FIRST web site.
The same for the goals is HERE
The center “raised” goal specs are HERE
And the “vision” tetras are defined HERE
Lastly, if you want to make your own tetra joining “clovers” out of some plastic or metal material, the specs for just the clover part are HERE