Our team received our field pieces today, and we spend the entire day assembling the field. The field is definitely a lot of work to build, it took about 8 of us a little over 3 hours to assemble everything, and that was before we attached the parking tiles to the floor. Seems a little excessive to me 
However, I am impressed with the quality of the pieces, the field pipes and poles, especially in the flag structures, have surprisingly good structural integrity and stability, and the pieces seem very unlikely to break. The only real issue we have run into so far has been one of our flags being significantly harder to turn than the others, and this was solved with some white lithium grease.
TLDR: Field took a long time to build, but the field and pieces are good quality
Thatās good news. One of the biggest problems in previous field sets have been the quality of the pieces.
Can you comment on how transporting the elements from event to event is going to be? We also have to tear down and set up between build sessions. Last year I used thumb screws to make the process go faster, but it was still 20 mins up and down. Thanks!
The process is going to be pretty long, but depending on how much transport space you have, you can keep the flag setups intact and that will save you a lot of assembly time. Hopefully, a lot of it was first time assembly and stuff that will not need to get taken apart and rebuilt in the future.
@Poseyhead ā Itās going in the back of a Nissan Cube/Kia Soul with the back seats folded down. I have 4ā3" from the back of the seats to the hatch door and about 2ā8" from the floor to the roof liner. Iām going to guess that the flag setups will need to get a partial disassemble.
@Foster I am not looking forward to moving this, It took four of us 3 hours to build our field kit. That was mostly just getting all the fittings attached to the pipe, I donāt imagine it will take long to set up after the initial construction. Iām mostly concerned about keeping the cheap net from tangling
Just wonderingā¦ will zip ties help?
We are receiving our game element in 2 hours time, so any tips will be great for us.
I do not know if zip ties will help. I struggled the most getting the net properly tight without bending the poles.
I would suggest using the fantastic instruction booklet and maybe a power drill because youāll have a lot fasteners to tighten.
@TheColdedge ā thanks for the heads up. VEX GDC goes back and forth between game you can carry in a paper bag and games that need a Ford F150 to move. The fence was a huge mess, last year was easy, this year looks hard. As an EP starting to look at the cost of the game elements. More expensive year to year. No longer one-click here, now itās you need two of these, four of theseā¦ and soon you are at a 1/2 the cost of a robot.
Looking to the 2020 game ābucket of ballsā where there are 6 Homer buckets - 3 orange and black and 3 black and orange. Floor has 250 tennis balls across the floor in a random pattern. 1:45 to score all the balls you can in the buckets, buckets are weighed, heaviest buckets win. They supply the balls in 7 buckets with snap on lids. Easy to move, easy to set up, easy to score, easy to reset, cheap to buy. VexU game starts with the lids snapped onto the empty buckets. Dumping an opposing bucket is a DQ. Corporate sponsor is Home Depot and the US Tennis Association. At the end of the year, field elements are donated to āWhoās a good boy??ā foundation for dogs.
10/10 - I cracked up
In all seriousness, I think the flag structures will be fairly easy to transport, I will just be color coding the PVC structures so we know which nondescript pole belongs to which field (we have four), and leaving the poles screwed to the walls, because attaching them was an epic pain.
10,000 ping pong balls, field reset is done with the big Rigid shop-vac from Home Depot (which will sponsor the contest), and parts transportation will be in Homer Buckets with lids.