So I was taking apart our old holonomic base (redesign for worlds), and after about a year or rolling about on the field, this is the result…
Shafts are also blackened form metal shavings and grease, as well as wound up with human hairs…
My question is, What is the dirtiest robot you’ve ever seen/had to clean? Picture examples are accepted too 
Parts of my robot are actually rusting slightly which I found semi amusing.
some of our screws have started doing that too
Martin 2 V1 (our first nbn robot) was filthy when we took apart the flywheel. Sawdust was stuck all over any parts that we applied lubricant to.
That’s our problem, we lubricate everything, and the metal filings from cutting parts just get everywhere
A few years before I joined, my team spray painted all of our steel, so now it’s all flaking off. When we took our first NBN robot apart, it was full of dark red powder.
Our flywheel was/is currently pretty gross. I avoid taking it apart because there is stuff from January in it. Using the wrong lubricant also did not help at all.
Yeah… Sorry about that, it was supposed to differentiate different teams metal. I was just going to post the exact same thing on this thread. 
I remember it got caught in our skyrise robots drive train at our first competition.
A few months ago we accidentally over-compressed the balls going through our flyhweel, we shredded one of them, and it was a huge pain the clean all the ball dust out of the robot and the court.
We had a flood a few weeks ago. Grime and a slimy mud layer everywhere in the lower part of the basement warehouse we rent.
Luckily robots were elevated off the ground but some cases of balls, nets, and field sides were not so lucky.
Lol we’ve done the same thing :P. Bent something off angle and all of a sudden our rubber band drum has become a wood chipper.
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Yesterday after I posted that I adjusted our intake, and it shredded another ball… All over our nice clean clear plastic plate. (Not to mention inside our drive gearing.)
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I managed to keep my robot clean for the most part after dec 4th. That night we were shredding balls like nobody’s business. We reduced compression for the tournament the next day and haven’t so much as scuffed a ball since even using two 5in wheels for the launcher. But we had small bits of gunk all over the inside of the flywheel and in the gear boxes because of the grease. We had to use a dremel brush to get the crap off. But now the robot is being rebuilt and the gearboxes can be reborn new again so they have that new robot feel.
Our omniwheels that we are using for the flywheel have so much ball dust in them that the little rollers don’t spin without significant effort.
Our room is moist and we have rusty parts. Whenever a a nice big rain comes our robotics room floods, it was also a big issue spring last year because we got a lot of snow and it was melting. Awhile ago on a Sunday the sprinklers went off on the third floor of the building we are in, the water trickled down into the rooms we used as pits in our robotics competition the following Saturday and all the way down into the basement and the robotics room. Fortunately we had tarps with which we covered the robot and computers. But we’ve never had sludge. As for dirty robots, last year our robot had really long telescoping arms and we used grease on them (mostly lithium grease but also lard) and I took all the metal from the arms home to wash it in a mud sink and I couldn’t get it all off, in pretty sure we still have metal that if you take a deep enough whiff you can still smell bacon.
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Since we really don’t have a field at my house, I’ll sometimes drive on the carpet because at least it’s more similar to foam than a concrete garage floor. I have a dog that sheds a lot. We used grease in many subsystems and gears. That did not end well. 0/10 do not recommend
Hmmm…I think seeing dried soy sauce all over a certain robot last year certainly stands out to me.
Go to harbor freight and get a pack of these: http://www.harborfreight.com/anti-fatigue-foam-mat-set-4-pc-61607.html Well worth the $8 to keep your wheels clean and have a good surface to drive on.