Hey.
After this past competition we noticed that the noodles inside our bumpers were able to be moved/wiggled around inside the fabric. We had used some masking/electrical tape to attach the noodles to the plywood, which was then covered in the bumper fabric. While the bumpers were still perfectly functional at the end of the competition, I’m curious as to how other teams have made their bumpers more robust.
My best guess would be loads of duct tape?
Thanks,
Hades
My team would apply adhesive to the wood and attach the noodles that way. Although our bumpers at the the end of the competition would look like it’s sagging, the pool noodles would stay on the wood.
The noodles wiggle around inside the bumper, it should not be a problem if you have the fabric as tight as you can get it. We ended up re stapling our fabric half way through our first regional, to keep the bumpers from sagging.
A combination of all of the above strategies work for us. We gaff tape the noodles on pretty tightly, then get the fabric as tight as it can possibly go over the noodles and wood. We haven’t had any problems with this so far, and our bumpers look almost new after 4 events and counting.
Pretty much everything mentioned before is what we did. Our team duct taped the noodles on at several points using pretty thick layers of the stuff; the layers and tightness helped prevent the noodles from moving too extensively. Then we pulled the fabric on really tight to reduce further movement. Our woodboard was also cut to exactly two noodle widths (super precise metric measurement there) so there was no slippage of the foam.
This year our fabric was a dual-tone flip-velcro cover so that we wouldn’t have to remove the bumpers to change our colour (life is SO easy when we need to change alliances now) but we then needed to ensure the noodles wouldn’t slip around inside with the duct tape.
Now that I think about it, if your bumper has to be wider than the noodle widths, taping the noodles over and putting a line of adhesive (hot glue comes to mind) at the base would probably prevent the bottom and top from rolling around. Perhaps a strategy for next year… 
Edit: We also taped the noodles to each other, helping improve their structural integrity.
A few strips of Gorilla Tape to keep the pool noodles in place, and then pull the fabric as tight as you can get it without compressing the noodles.
All the methods that I used to create my teams bumpers were already mentioned. What I did specifically was apply hot glue to the top of the wood where the noodles touched as well as the bottom. I also had both of the noodles hot glued together. After the hot glue was dry I wrapped the noodles and wood together at multiple spot. One last thing was that I had two other people pulling the fabric tight as I stapled it to the wood. Hope this helps :]
We use pretty strong double sided tape to attach the pool noodles to the wood and then wrap the fabric around as tightly as possible without squishing the noodles. The tape for us is enough and it’s still a bit of a struggle to get the pool noodles off of the wood when dismantling the bumpers after we are done with them.
Durable fabric, pulled tight and secured properly (plenty of staples and/or aluminum angle) should hold the bumpers together just fine for the season. We have some bumpers on a practice bot that have been around for at least 4 years, and they’re still nice and tight with no sagging.
My team has a wiki with a page on reversible bumpers: http://wiki.bpsrobotics.org/wiki/index.php/Bumpers
What pool noodle do you guys use for your bumpers? We had serious problems with our noodle compressing over the length of PNW CMP due to the heavy hits we took and delivered.
Use recommended fabric only.
Use solid noodles.
Staple fabric well on bottom at back of plywood.
Place noodles.
Start in middle and pull REAL tight then staple.
Work your way down one half following above procedure.
Repeat going the other way.
Make nice tight ends and staple well.
If not really tight, pull staples in loose area and pull harder.
Works well every time.
This is how we have made our bumpers in the past as well as this year, it works quite well and the inspectors have always liked them!
We put ours together during that window when the rules had been changed to disallow any additional material to hold the noodles in place. To compress the noodles as much as possible so they expand to tighten up the fabric, we used another piece of wood and tie down straps. It made a sandwich of wood-fabric-noodle-wood, all held in place with the straps. It worked very well, and the bumpers held up all through regionals. You can see some photos of the process on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.487785371343130.1073741839.426661894122145&type=3
Some of the other albums there show the final product once we added the black liner and aluminum edging. They attached to the bot via T gussets on the bumpers and screw posts on the frame corners. To swap, it was just a matter of taking off some wing nuts.