In a few weeks I’ll be approaching our local school board (we’re a community 4H team) about use of a space for drive practice. The space we’re most likely to get access to is one of the cafegymatoriums and we would need to set up and tear down any time we practice. We don’t yet own carpet but it would need to be rolled up and likely put on a rolling dolly to store under a stage when not in use. Could anyone speak to how much carpet rolls weigh? Are they rigid enough once rolled to put on top of individual small dollies for moving or does it need a longer supported platform? In terms of gaffer tape, do you need to wrap the whole perimeter to keep it still or can you economize and acceptably tack it down with smaller pieces? I can see having to tape the whole thing could get spendy pretty quick. We’d love to optimize the set up so it can go down and up as easily as possible, any general tips would be appreciated. Thanks!
HEAVY. But, once rolled, you can use a distributed strategy with 3-4 dollies. I’d recommend building your own for this, or get the heaviest furniture dollies from McMaster. (And then fight to keep said dollies out from under other things… like a robot.)
Seconded. A full size (75’ x 15’) carpet is north of 400lb. Rolling it up and lifting it onto dollies is a four to six person job. If you go with smaller carpets (say, 12’ x 30’), the weight of each roll falls to ~125 lb, light enough to be moved by 2 people.
This is the route we went with the carpet you guys gave us last year. We cut the 7.5’ wide rolls it into roughly 30’ lengths of carpet (our current practice space is 25’ x 30’). We roll up 4 lengths of it at the end of every night to store out of the way. While not ideal (ideal would be a dedicated/permanent practice space 
), it’s definitely manageable moving the rolls with 2 people.
If you don’t need (or don’t always need) a full field and want to minimize installation time I would suggest 15’x37.5’ rolls. Set up two when you want a half field and four when you want a full field (though splitting it in corners might make hard to align when you want to use a full field).
We have have a ~15’x20’ roll that we use when we don’t want to bother to go to the local, communal practice field. That 15’x20’ roll is not difficult with two people and I suspect that a 15’x37.5’ roll would be fairly manageable with three reasonably strong people.
I suggest this for a few reasons:
- If you have a stage to store them under 15’ long rolls shouldn’t be an issue.
- Having four 7.5’ rolls sounds like a a pain to align (though I don’t have any personal experience).
- This way if you only need a half field you can get away with only moving two rolls.
As for taping it down, I’m not sure. We didn’t bother taping down our 15’x20’ carpet (and we didn’t generally put field components on it) but it definitely did slide around some. The bigger the carpet the better it should be at staying still… in theory.
Everything about a full roll of carpet is a royal pain. We prefer to have closer to 8-10 people to move one roll. That said, if you are not moving it far, I would get the largest carpets you can, 2-3 dollies per roll, and work out how to keep people from injuring themselves with the number of people you have. For example have your two strongest mentors lift one end for a few seconds while someone else slides a dolly under it. Very little, if any, tape needs to be used when moving carpet around inside a building on dollies, but if you do find you need to hold it together, I recommend cheap straps.
The reason I would avoid several small carpets is, the seams will need gaff tape every time you set up, and carpet stretches and deforms as its used. After 2 seasons of drive practice our field carpet has become a pair of bananas with a few inches of curvature we have to deal with at the center seam.
Having access to a full field is an extraordinary advantage, but be careful you’re not missing an opportunity for full time access to a small field in your regular space in pursuit of a few hours with a larger field. You may also want to think about field elements. just placing the field elements accurately can take a good about of time, they also need to be stored, and many years they have to be disassembled to fit through doors. Its all well and good to have a big carpet, but without at least a half field worth of field elements you won’t be able to simulate matches.
Is that a challenge?
Yes, the field elements are definitely also on my mind, but permanent installation is simply not an option for us. We can drive to a shared practice space organized by some larger teams and that’s been wonderful but it’s an hour away from us, so we’re focused for now on just getting some space where we can have students be able to drive at all, more frequently/earlier in the season or off-season.
Pre-pandemic we had about a half field drive space in our old 2000sqft sponsored space. Covid times changed all that. We’ve been meeting in garages for the last 2 years with no ability to drive other than that shared practice space an hour away that puts us fully dependent on other teams for access. Makes things like autonomous work and basic driver training a much heavier lift when you have to commit 2 hours to driving (cars) for a little practice in the evening. So we’re working in making steps towards a closer relationship with the local schools, there have been some local political changes to school administration that make this much more possible than it used to be, so we’ll be thrilled for a place we can put down carpet for a few hours at a time, even if there’s nothing else on it. A side benefit will be simply being more visible in the schools to help recruiting. Being in a small town there is literally no vacant space that could support a permanent field without taking up some other existing use, so we’ll move incrementally and take what we can get.
Sounds like you know what your getting into. Oh, and we have never taped down our carpet around the edges, you really only need to tape where robots are likely to drive over the edge or seam. we’ve never had a decent sized carpet move around on the floor.
What you want is called a carpet yankee. Game changing tool 
Its a pair of 2 caster widgets that stab into the end of the carpet roll and use a short throw lever to lift it onto the casters. Maybe 3 people to run off with a roll! Lift process is one person stops things from rolling and one lifts. Ok to lift one end at a time.
I made our pair. Easy welding/fab job. MAJOR win!!!
Honestly, FRC should have a pair with the field!
Ohhh, thats nice I’d totally build that if were moving the carpets regularly. (Not much point for events as most carpets only see one official event.)
First, we should clarify if you’re talking about a carpet dolly or a furniture dolly. A lot of people in FRCFIRST Robotics Competition refer to furniture dollies as carpet dollies because, well, they are the dollies used to transport the carpet. They’re also carpeted which doesn’t help (see the link to a “carpeted furniture dolly”). I’m assuming you’re talking about those, but if you’re actually talking about a real carpet dolly, that’s a whole other can of worms. Anyhow:
I’m not sure what rigidity has to do with it (genuine q, not totally understanding). Are you asking if you can use a few small furniture dollies to move and store the carpet? If so, the answer is yes. That’s how venues that don’t have forklifts transport carpets to/from the field. Bigger carpet dollies are easier to maneuver given the weight and size, of course, and I’d say the rule of thumb should be that you should use the largest dollies you can fit in your storage space.
Furniture dollies are probably not an ideal long-term storage solution (though I’m no expert, here, so someone else can weigh in). But I’d think that if the carpet isn’t staying in storage for more than couple days at a time, keeping it on the dollies between uses is probably fine.
I think tape is game dependent, and also depends what you’re doing in terms of a permitter. Short of creating a tripping hazard, I don’t see a reason you need to tape the entire permitter each time. Depending on what is going on the carpet and where, you may have some issues with it riding up, elements falling over, etc. It also depends on how much of the carpet is drivable.
Having a cardboard or metal tube as the core will help with handling and make the roll not floppy. The carpet dollies and carpet yankee both need a core or a tight wrap to work right.
The yankee avoids the difficult “pick up a large roll problem”
If you are doing the mob-o-kids method, you might sew up some lifting straps. Roll the carpet over them and kids can grab from both sides.
We host a lot of offseason events and have to move carpet around frequently we use these still takes a couple people but the carpet can kind of be rolled on to it.
We have one set that was purchased and then we had another set made at a local automotive exhaust shop that we welded casters to ourselves considerably cheaper.
As far as field elements go it’s such a variability every year. If it’s just for practice you might be able to get away with lighter construction materials and design in such a way they could be somewhat disassembled without tools quickly.
Some years ago, for a local practice field, someone built a couple of heavy-duty dollies. 2x4s, strong casters, carriage bolts, no carpet wrap. I forget if they were used 2 or 3 per roll, though.
When I was moving rockets around, we sometimes used furniture-type dollies which were pretty much a thick sheet of plywood on casters.
Yeah, that’s it, just wondering if carpet sags too much in the middle that it would deform or drag without uniform support. The carboard tube in the middle or the yankee roller kind of make sense on that part. I don’t specifically mean furniture dollies, but that sort of smaller individual dolly idea instead of one large contiguous dolly.
The mat cart is pretty nice, wil the roll on and tilt to drive off! It won’t get very far off the ground, though. At our school we have to cross a curb and go up into a shipping container!
We use 5, 7.5x65 (ish) carpets for our full field, and aligning them isn’t much of an issue bc there’s always more carpet than needed. We cut one carpet in half so we have two 30 ft carpets which we usually use when practicing due to space concerns. the small carpets can be moved fairly easily by 1-2 people, while the large ones require 2-3 people. We usually use a cart to move them longer distances which we borrow from the school’s custodians.
As for tape, we usually tape down any side the robot is expected to cross. so the middle of two carpets should be taped so no carpet gets stuck in the wheels. We also put short pieces of tape perpendicular to the carpet to hold it on better