Sunday, December 13, 2020
Have you ever had a chance to make a home made project for your family? With people being stuck at home here is a fun way to create and make fun projects at home from your local hardware store. We found simple materials, and will perhaps add pictures in the future to highlight how quick and easy you can build things from furniture to mouse traps to other appliances and electronic projects.
PVC is basically polyvinyl chloride which is a type of plastic material made for indoor plumbing. It often comes in Schedule 40 or Schedule 80. Schedule 40 is usually white and pressure rated for liquids usually while Schedule 80 is grey and often for electrical.
PVC comes in various diameters such as 1/2 inch, 3/4 inch, 1 inch, 2 inch, 3 inch and many other sizes. It has a certain thickness and hollow center.
Often when buying PVC you can buy the straight pipe tubing in lengths of 5 feet or 10 feet. And then there are various fittings that can come in shapes like elbows, tees, and 3-way, 4-way, 5-way and various angles like 45 degree angle. It is not very common to see 6-way fittings in PVC but you can usually see that for metal non-PVC pipes. Although we have seen custom fittings. You can find a lot of the products in a local hardware store rack. There are other kinds of materials like ABS, CPVC and other plastic types, but for our purposes we’ll talking about just PVC today.
You can also find furniture grade PVC that is a bit more rigid and able to withstand outdoor temperatures a bit better. PVC pipe is usually made for indoors so any exposure to outside sun can cause changes in shape and flexibility of the pipe which is why if you have some PVC pips you use for a reason outdoors that’s not furniture grade that it’s recommended to paint the product.
We found if you order PVC pipe you can go to a few different online shops and get items relatively cheaply, but the hardest part is coughing up shipping. Some sites charge an additional $12 to $20 for shipping and weight. This is of course to be somewhat expected since pipes can be an odd thing to ship through the mail.
Another thing to note is how to cut down long pipes. You can sometimes use regular saws, miter and circular saws or ratchet cutters for the purpose of doing so. Then it’s often a good idea to get some deburring tool which strips or sands down the tiny loose plastic pieces at the ends that may make fitting together pieces difficult. You might also get a file or sand paper if you’re in a pinch.
We found that you can create for cheap mouse, vole and squirrel feeders or bait stations similar to a JT Eaton toploading brand with a few simple pipes and fittings on YouTube. There there were some great videos from a farmer that built one for the field as well as others that use it to keep their farms pest free.
You may also use PVC pipes to make lawnchair furniture, tables, and even coffee tables. The sky is the limit and limited by creativity. You can even get laminate or lawnchair vinyl strips to help piece everything together.
Another thing about PVC pipe is it can be heated up and bent into shapes, but often you will need to add hot sand to help retain the shape to keep the pipe from collapsing against itself. There is a website where you can find tensile strength and various pressures and sheer limits on PVC pipe. It’s good to know if you’re trying to build some crazy contraption and swing from the chandeliers for those crazy bucks.
Lastly for parents that are trying to keep their big kids occupied perhaps you can buy some large colored pieces of furniture grade PVC and make large life size Lego style projects to create things, build model cars or even toilet paper holders. It takes a bit of time and maybe a drill, a few drill bits, perhaps pieces of wood or even small blocks of concrete, hot glue, foam, metal bars, paint, and wing nuts to build some interesting items. It can definitely keep a person busy for the afternoon.
Give PVC and pipefittings, ABS fittings a look-see next time you’re at the hardware store and you might come up with something neat to build.
Know any other cool art project ideas? Leave us a comment.
