Our team has been trying to build the pyramid and are having difficulty keeping it from twisting and staying stable. Has anyone else experienced this or have any advice? Thanks.
The low cost field is kind of a disaster.
We have 2 winch straps making an “X” fron the top corner to the bottom opposite corner. That helped a little bit but it’s still pretty unstable.
My team went to the local muffler shop and got inch and a half exhaust pipe to build our pyramid. It ended up costing us $235 but is very sturdy!
Yeah, the problem is FIRST put out a giant piece of crap as the team pyramid. It’s not just you.
We figured we’d save some time by building the team spec pyramid to tide us over until we get a better one later, but I don’t think we would have wasted the time and money if we realized how rickety it is.
We can confirm. It is truly brutal. It won’t quit twisting. It’s up for now to prototype but we may have to fix to climb.
Ya our pyramid is not very stable either.
we figure if we can climb this rickety pyramid we can climb any thing.
After the bridge fiasco last year (completely wrong dynamics) I became very wary of the Team Drawings that FIRST provides.
After looking at the setup for this year’s Team Pyramid, my team decided to build a real one. Luckily we have a mentor who welds and was willing to construct ours. We got ERW tube instead of DOM (much cheaper) and it’s working out fine for us.
We just built our Pyramid in 1/2 day wit cheap 1.67 steel pipe - it is a rock solid monster. And we got the steel pipe from a local supplier at cost ($1.80/ft) and a genius mentor welded it for us and had all the kids do a bit of welding. Our partner Highshool took 4 days of hard labor to build the FRC home-version (with U bolts) and they are tearing their hair out with that wobbly contraption!
Advice: don’t build the horrible U-bolt contraption. Get a professional welder to help you build a proper pyramid. You will need a plasma cutter for the gusset plates, and a mig welder for the pipes.
Dean
Yeah,
We went to a sponsor (Red Jacket Firearms) and they taught our students TIG and MIG welding. It’s strong as a rock.
Go to this thread for cheaply doing a sturdy metal ($1/foot) 1-1/4" conduit (1.51" OD) pyramid using mostly off the shell bolt together H/W items to assemble.
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/showthread.php?t=110888&page=2&highlight=rrledford
Cost ~$200 in materials/
-Dick Ledford
We had the parents build us a full game field on the kick-off weekend, so we discovered how bad the lost cost field pyramid was right up front.
Best solution is to weld it. If you can not weld it, the second best is to cut sheet metal gussets for all 12 ‘corners’, bolt three bolts up from the intersection on leg, and then fold it about 2 inches out each way to match the horizontal bars and bolt them with three bolts each. The bolt heads will be less of an obstacle that the wood plate and U bolts.
Third is to keep what you have and stiffen it. That is what we ended up with. They added U bolts between the legs and the wooden wedges. They needed a slot cut in the back of the blocks of wood so that the U bolt plate would not slide up. And we added floor to top guy wires with turnbuckles on three sides. That leaves us with one side to test inside and outside up-the-middle climbs, and fairly good corners to test outside up-the-corner climbers.
Mike