What does your team use to make the clovers for tetras?

I’m just curious…we only got a few of the clover connecters in our kit, so we needed to make some more. We made some temporary ones out of cardboard and duct-tape :cool: , but only until we could find something better.

Does anyone have any other ideas for what we can effectively make them out of?

Lexan has been working fine for our team.

I meant besides lexan… :rolleyes:

Our team used aluminum, they work very good.

using a thin cutting board is what the kit uses and it works. you could also use thin aluminum or lexan

1/4th" lexan and a heat gun

We cut up a piece of vinyl siding to make a bunch. It was cheap and is working well to help visualize the actual sizes of the tetras, but it is not going to hold up once the bot starts handling them. We’ll have to make some more later from lexan or aluminum.

yeah we’re using like 1/8 lexan and one of our mentors used this metal sheets --just cut everything w/ snips and it works.

We got a plastic Mud Flap from a tractor trail from our advisors shop. Tough, easy to manipulate, cheap. any local Truck Shop should have it. Make sure its plastic though ans not rubber.

We used the sheet of HDPE from the 03 & 04 fields. The stuff works great and we have plenty of it.

I’ll ditto that. I think we began using that last year as scrap for projects and we pulled some pieces out of the junk bin and it works great. In fact, they almost have the same qualities as the kit clovers.

:cool:

We used Lexan, and heated it up with a heat gun after making the tetra so it didn’t crack and break.

We used Wal Mart. We found small cutting boards for 89 cents, bought most of the stock and brought em back. They were just big enough to cut two clovers out of. so $1.78 plus tax for 4 clovers, bot bad. The only problem was they wrre thick, so we had to use a heat gun (actually I lie, it was a blowtoarch) to melt them. Felt kinda funny after they caught on fire a few times.

-Tony K

My team used .032 aluminum sheeting. It worked great. Thin enough to bend and strong enough to hold the structure together. Cheap and easy to do.

We used some cheap flexible plastic, unfortunately our robot has been making quick work of the connectors, duck tape has become a new favorite.

We used 1/8 lexan it flexed pretty well, no need for heat gun nor propane torch. :slight_smile:

We tried making the center Tetra by using only the clover leaves included with the kit. We wanted to see if we could save some time by not machining out the parts in the manual. Wow was that was flimsy :). So then we thought that aluminum might be stronger, so we rebuilt everything with the plastic clover leaves doubled up with a aluminum cloverleaf cutout. It helped a bit but not enough, so then we added aluminum braces and the thing was fine :).

But anyways… Aluminum is an excellent substitute, just make sure to round off the edges or duct tape them so they aren’t too sharp :slight_smile:

we used three button backs and pop riveted them together into a trianglular shape. works pretty good and bends pretty good.

We also did ours out of vinyl siding but we didn’t have enough so we used the linoleum flooring stuff, works very well and is easy to manipulate

1/8 inch clear lexan works for us too!!