I’m an FRC alum from Texas Torque, FRC1477, currently going to Carnegie Mellon University (in Pittsburgh, PA). I’m currently working on building a robot (along with other FRC alum!) that plays ice hockey.
For testing our robot, we’re in need of an ice-like material to simulate the ice (ice time is especially expensive in the Spring and we’re on a relatively tight budget).
If there are any teams within a day’s drive of western PA with Glasliner FRP (the Regolith material from Lunacy) lying around and not useful, we’d greatly appreciate if we could borrow it. We would be more than happy to drive out, pick it up, and return it in mid-May once we’ve finished the project.
Please let us know by responding here or PMing me. Thanks so much!
Shyam
I’d be surprised if anyone has any of that still kicking around! If you can’t find any I seem to recall it was sold as some sort of interior shower covering thing.
For automotive testing we general wet ceramic tiles. Might be a cheap alternative if you can get some donated and do some basic shielding of components from water (you’ll probably want to do this for ice anyway).
We found some of this stuff when we were cleaning out the shop years ago. It really deteriorates over time (at least being stored in the back of the shop), and when we cut up the sheets to dispose of it, it released very-not-good particulates that gave us some trouble breathing (short-term–we stopped). I don’t recall if regolith did this to begin with, though I doubt HQ would have specced it if so. Either way be careful if you get any after all these years.
As I understand it, it was shower surround plastic with an “orange peel” texture. We bought some of the same stuff this year at Home Depot for our feeder station and early iterations of the robot gearslide.
Team 2053 (TigerTronics) in Endicott, NY has a lot of those sheets that you can have. But we don’t want them back. We are about 5 1/2 hours from Pittsburgh.
funny…as I was reading this post last night, I was on my way home from the inaugural San Francisco regional, hauling the robot. I had stopped at an In-N-Out burger place in Casa Grande, for late lunch. That same burger place where our team stopped on the way home for lunch in 2009, after the Lunacy kickoff event we attended in Phoenix. And that’s the first place I ever noticed Regolith…in the restroom, on the walls. Since then, I’ve seen it all over the place, and still stop by the sheet goods isle in building supply stores to check stock and prices, out of habit
Have fun.
btw last weekend, Andy Baker was at the regional, and I pointed out the Lunacy wheels on our battery cart, and he took a picture of them
