Many of us who have built FTC fields in the past several seasons know the frustration of trying to insert the rubber stoppers into the HIPS pipes, a-la Step 5 of the Submersible setup guide in the Field Assembly manual.
Today I tried something a little different – I wiped some silicone lubricant to the sides of the stopper before trying to insert it into the pipe. It slides in much more easily – I can actually push it in with my hand or with a small tool we created to make this easier. Once it remains there for a few minutes, the silicone lubricant dries and the assembly becomes fairly secure – I can’t easily remove the stopper by pulling or further pushing on the bolt.
Since I’m often called upon to help build many fields in a season, this becomes a huge time-and-frustration saver for me.
My question is… does anyone see any issues with advising other teams and event hosts in our region of this assembly tip? Silicone lubricant is generally considered safe for use on rubber (whereas WD-40 and other lubricants are often not “rubber safe”).
The specific lubricant I used for this is 3-in-one All-Temp Silicone, available from a local Lowes and Home Depot.
Soapy water does indeed seem to work also – great suggestion! I need to wait for this test sample to dry to see if it compromises holding power at all (while wet, it’s still possible to move the rubber stopper by hand easily).
It’s hard for me to get over the Power Play-era fear of rubber stoppers slipping back out of the pipes. Since there shouldn’t be much causing the stoppers to slide out, this seems fine. My recommendation was plain water — soapy water sounds even better — mostly because it would be easily accessible and not leave behind much evidence of its use. Though, since both ends are plugged this year, I do wonder what might be growing in there by the end of the season.
So, several hours later and I’m still able to pull out the soap+water lubricated stopper by hand (although needing much more force than earlier), while I need tools to pull out the silicone lubricated one.
That said, there could be other small differences that explain the outcome other than just the lubrication used. I tested soap-and-water on a stopper from CenterStage and silicone on a new stopper from ITD (I don’t have any other new ITD stoppers to test at the moment), so perhaps age is a factor here. If I get my hands on another “new” stopper I might try back.
Regardless, lubricating the rubber with either silicone or soap+water definitely makes installation easier, and it feels to me as though it doesn’t remove easily enough in either case to warrant not using the lubrication… but more testing might be needed.
Plain water for the win. I tried plain water as suggested and it also made it much easier to slide the stoppers into the pipe. When the water evaporated (which on my test took the better part of a day), the stopper was fairly well secure in the pipe.
With soap and water I kind of felt like perhaps there was some soap residue left over that didn’t hold the stopper quite as well.
Anyway, for people assembling the chamber bars I’d definitely recommend slightly (only slightly) dampening the large end of the rubber stopper. This made it much easier to insert the stopper+screw assembly, and when it dried it seemed to hold up reasonably well.
