during the long island reginoal we had a promblem with our collection system where the balls with fly our the robot and not land i our storage bin. we spend two days doing all of this complex ways top slove this issue and the last thing we tried was just putting a piece of carboard up and that worked way better then anything esle.
Ditto! 
We used it because it was lightweight, flexible and CHEAP!
One more to contribute: Gaffer’s tape. Lots and [i]lots of gaffer’s tape. (We used up most of a roll on The Blackout.)
Our conveyor belt this year was built mostly out of canvas, styrofoam, and mountain bike tires and was stitched together with dental floss. Which is an upgrade from our prototype belt, which was literally stapled together. 
Also, our ball-dumping mechanism was literally a string. (I’ll post a picture if I can find one; our bot hasn’t been shipped back yet so I can’t take one.)
I don’t think this year’s robot has anything particularly “redneck” on it… but last year, our gripper was made out of driveway reflectors. And of course, the rookie robot in '03 was primarily plywood, so it doesn’t look as high quality as later years. It no longer exists, though.
wood and lanyard, hotglue and hope, zipties and zen
A team I saw at Palmetto used almost an entire grocery shopping cart as their robot.
Well being from Alabama…
We used to put our robot up on cinder blocks (redneck jackstands) in the pit.
But now we “transport” our robot with our space shuttle cart.
Our '07 bot used a paint brush as a chain tensioner. And a stress ball cut in half acting like a spring.
Our spiral hopper’s center shaft is made up of hairbrushes we found at Walgreens.
And the turret (driven by a friction wheel) is lined with weather stripping to improve the grip.
Does it get more redneck than duct tape ? but honestly… what is better than duct tape ?!?
as far as redneck stories i have heard one from a team member from a time before i was on the team. it might be redneck but it was good thinking.
the story goes that at the competition the robot had some super shifters and allegedly one of them broke. so in order to keep a particular gear a teammate fashioned some wire and pop sickle sticks together to hold a particular piece in place.
lo and behold the robot stayed in gear.
haha
Our entire robot was redneck. We used scraps of metal we had left over from previous years and a bunch of zip ties to hold the game pieces in our robot.
I also made a suggestion for next year: build a robot such that it looks like it’s made of scrap, but it works really well.
I think ours was one of the most ‘redneck’ robots out there. We’re disorganized and cheap and we rarely go out and BUY the things we need, instead preferring to use what we have.
- Half the bolts and nuts on are robot are metric, the other half are SAE.
- Our rollers are made out of PVC endcaps and ABS tubing, with long bolts threaded through each side to hold them on the robot.
- Our hopper is made of wood. The first one we had (that we won the 10,000 Lakes Regional with) was unpainted and signed by the team.
- Our servo arms were made out of rulers. When they fell off in the finals, we duct taped cardboard on instead. For some team spirit, our driver pulled out a permanant marker and wrote ‘General Dynamics’ on one of them.
- All of our wires are held down with hastily done zip ties. It looks like spaghetti.
- Finally, when we re-did our bumpers at Nationals we ran out of bumper fabric, so we used some of those black Altium bags they were giving out to cover the pool noodle. Oops.
(This is what happens when your robot is built on the impression that you won’t make it past quals in your single regional competition. I wouldn’t recommend it, hah.)
We used a Wintergreen Altoids container to hold our Accelerometer and Gyro. It had a few wires coming of the side. Our team always has to point out the Altoids box to everyone. A picture of it even ended up in the local paper!