Hi everybody,
My team has broken a few stars and we no longer have enough stars to do a full skills run. We went to the VEX Robotics website and the only option is to buy 1/4 of a full field. My team doesn’t need a full set of stars and cubes…we only need 1 star. Is there a way to only purchase one star?
Thanks!
If you’ve only broken a few stars, you would probably be better off just using hot glue or super glue to repair them rather than trying to purchase single stars.
We use big zip ties to fix the stars. We only have about 12 unbroken stars (it takes 24 to make a full field). We have fixed stars in up to 4 pieces using zip ties, and they worked just fine. Sadly I don’t have a picture of how we fixed them, but I can add one later if someone wants it. I would recommend it over hot glue though. From what I’ve seen, hot glue will easily break again.
We just have it all planned out where we throw our one cube/stars to each other to set them up real quick, for programming skills at least…
We don’t have enough objects to run a driver skills run(we’ve seriously NEVER practiced a driver skills run this season that I can remember at least :P).
As far as repairing a star goes, we were able to just put a rubber band around the broken part and that “worked” i guess…
VEX suggests hot glue as a solution.
robotmesh.com sells single stars. I dont think it is worth it because its $10 a star, your probably better off hot gluing them.
This is the direct link to ordering single stars.
When you buy the complete game kit, the stars cost $10 each, so if you want new ones, it’s the same price per star either way.
Yes. Definitely go to RobotMesh. You will get the stars very quickly too so you can immediately get practicing.
Personally, before spending $10 for a star, I would try to fix it. Super glue loctite has worked well for us (60 second one). Put super glue on and put rubber bands to hold it together. Then let it sit for several hours and, voila, a star that’s intact with a slightly visible line where it broke.
But getting new stars would be really nice…
I really liked the low cost Robosource.net balls, but the game objects this year are probably slightly too complex to personally produce.
We keep fixing them with hot glue but they tend to break again at the same spot. Another EP in our area has a parent that is a chemist. He has a chemical compound to permanently fix stars but I don’t think its available publicly. Our teams have resorted to stretching rubber bands across the tines of the stars to hold the break and that works fine.
We worked with a professional adhesive expert / chemist to repair some broken stars. The expert used high strength double sided tape in the square hole where the 2 point star section meets the 4 point star section. He cleaned the break in the star with some pretty high tech equipment, and glued it with some industrial strength special purpose adhesive.
As an alternative to this lengthy process we started using brown “Gorilla Glue”.
Personally I haven’t had much luck with hot glue.