Welcome back to the workshop. Today I'll be showing you how to make a sleek and seriously powerful bow from PVC pipe. PVC is a fun and very affordable choice for anyone who wants to make a bow.
I'm starting with 3 quarter inch gray schedule 80 PVC. I cut this pipe to 52 inches long and then I marked the center and two inches on either side. That's your handle area. Next mark the tips five inches from the ends.
These will later become the C-Haws. When you heat your pipe, you need to keep the heat gun moving at all times. Don't ever let the pipe turn brown or darken.
A well-made PVC bow will not shatter. If you pull it to its failure point, it should buckle instead. You can make a perfectly safe bow out of PVC, but not if you burn the pipe.
In order to get the entire boat abandoned and store more energy, we need to taper the limbs. Here's a very simple way to press a taper into the limbs. I'm using a set of spacer blocks the same thickness as our pipe, three quarters of an inch.
I'll be using clamps to hold down this jig, but if you're fairly strong or heavy you can just sit on it or force it down. Release the clamps before the bow cools all the way so that you can make some manual adjustments. Make sure the tips are in alignment with the handle and nothing looks uneven. We want the tips to be light, yet sturdy.
I'm making static recurves on this bow. We'll start by flattening the tips perpendicular to the limbs. Start heating the ends and once the pipe reaches a high enough temperature it'll remember its round shape. Try to keep the heat isolated at the tips. and don't heat anything below that 5 inch mark we made from the tips.
I flattened the tips with a padded vise, but you can also do this by hand or with some gloves. Now I'll add a bit of reflex. The more reflex you add, the harder it will be to balance your bow later, so try to keep to a modest amount, like 3 or 4 inches.
Now that the tips are rigid, we'll lighten them by cutting away the excess. If you have a scraper, that's a great way to smooth out your tool marks and avoids the use of sandpaper. You can use sandpaper too, I just hate to sand if it can be avoided. Next I'll shape the handle by narrowing it and adding a bit of reflex, but the reflex at the handle is completely optional.
Same as reflexing the tips, this will make the bow slightly harder to execute. In theory, reflex adds additional energy storage and performance, but in practice it also invites issues such as alignment problems or overstressing the material. If you'd like a bit of extra margin for error, or you're just getting a little frustrated with the build, make things easier for yourself by skipping that reflex at the handle.
Once everything cools, cut some nocks into your tips so that they can accept a string. I'm just using paracord for this bow. Paracord is not good bowstring material, but it will shoot an arrow if it's all you have. You can always upgrade to a better string later on, and you'll see a nice little boost in arrow speed.
At this point you may have to troubleshoot a bit, typically making alignment corrections with heat. I got lucky and this time the bow was decently tillered from the start. If you have to make heat corrections the handle is the best place to do this, because you won't affect the tiller of the limbs.
If one limb bends slightly more than the other, that's no problem, just use that one as your top limb. If the tiller is dramatically different between the limbs you may have to adjust the taper manually. This bow started as a 52 inch pipe and now draws over 55 pounds at 32 inches. For a lower poundage bow, start with a longer piece of PVC or use schedule 40 pipe instead of schedule 80. For a heavier bow, I'd recommend using thicker pipe, one or one and a quarter inches. If you enjoyed this build and know someone else who would like the project as well, please pass it along and maybe try it out together.
And if you need any help or advice with your build, Let me know in the comments or post on reddit on r slash bowyer and I'll drop in when I can. Check out my other videos for more bow making adventures and as always please keep supporting the craft by subscribing to this channel and any other bow making channels you come across. Until next time, may your arrows fly true.