Make Your Own Compound Bow from PVC Pipe

Have you ever wanted to make your own compound bow for fun or even fishing? [New creative DIY] shows us how in their YouTube video. Compound bows are very powerful in comparison to their longbow grandparents, relying on the lever principle or pulleys. meaning less power exertion for the same output.

Compound bows can be really sophisticated in design using pulleys and some exotic materials, but you can make your own with a few nuts and bolts, PVC pipe, string and a tyre inner tube. The PVC pipe can be melted into shape using a heat source such as a …read more

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Hackaday Prize Entry: Archelon ROV Explores the Ocean

Acendtech Robotics is a 4H robotics club located in Freehold, NJ, and their centerpiece project is the Archelon, an underwater drone they built out of PVC pipes. It’s also a Hackaday Prize entry designed to monitor marine traffic, the seabed, piers, jetties, and other underwater constructions.

The Archelon uses eight thrusters constructed out of bilge pumps that have been hacked to add a propeller, leaving the motor sealed safely inside.

The ROV’s motors are controlled by an Arduino Mega along with two motor driver boards, each board driving two pairs of DC motors. There’s also a robot claw rotated by …read more

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Holman is Your Phone’s Best Friend

Let’s get something straight right up front: this isn’t much of an electronics project. But it is a very artistic 3D printing project that contains some electronics. [Sjowett] used an off-the-shelf class D amplifier with BlueTooth input to create a simple BlueTooth speaker with a subwoofer. As you can see from the pictures, woofer is exactly the term to use, too.

The clever mechanical design uses 3D printing and common metric PVC pipe. That’s a great technique and resulted in a very clean and professional-looking build. If you don’t have easy access to metric pipe, you could print the pipes, …read more

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Build Your Own High Power Air Cannon Out Of PVC

[NightHawkInLight] a.k.a. [Ben] recently built an awesome high power air cannon out of PVC pipe. PVC air cannons are great, and everyone should build one of these at some point in their life, but what really makes this build exceptional is the valve. [Ben] created a piston valve for this cannon that can be built with parts sourced from your local home supply store. Anyone can build this thing, and everyone should.

Instead of using a ball valve or other such contrivance to dump air directly from a reservoir into the chamber of this PVC air cannon, [Ben] is using …read more

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Make a PVC Drill Press

There are two types of people in this world: people who think that PVC is only suitable for plumbing, and people who don’t even know that you can use PVC to carry water. Instructables user [amjohnny] is clearly of the latter school. His PVC Dremel drill press is a bit of an oldie, but it’s still a testament to the pipefitter’s art. And you can watch it in action in the video embedded below.

Things we particularly like about this build include the PVC parallelogram movement, springs around tubes to push the Dremel head back up, and the clever use …read more

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Hackaday Links: March 12, 2017

The world’s first public installation of a solar roadway caught fire or something.

Hey hardware nerds in the UK! Nottingham is having its first monthly hardware meetup. This get together is being put together by [Spencer], creator of the extremely popular RC2014 Homebrew Z80 computer kit. The meetup is free, and it’s happening this Tuesday.

[danjovic] sent in a link to this YouTube channel of a guy building stuff out of PVC sheets and CA glue. There’s a lot of stuff in here from a PVC tripod to instructions on how to get PVC sheets out of PVC pipe. Small …read more

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PVC Submersible ROV

[mark.brubaker.1] and his crew decided to make a submersible for a school project using PVC pipes as a frame. It has two motors on the back to provide forward thrust and steering as well as a horizontal mounted motor in the middle of the PVC chassis to provide up and down thrust. They used regular motors which they waterproofed by inserting them inside a case full of plumbers wax. We’re not sure how long this will hold at the bottom of the ocean, but it works fine for a school project in the pool. Here’s the instructions on how to …read more

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A DIY Net Gun To Catch Whatever You Want

Suspicious drones hovering about your property? Burglars or other ne’er-do-well test subjects giving you trouble? Need to catch a dog that keeps meandering through your workshop? [William Osman] suggests you build yourself a pneumatic net gun that can shoot 20-30 feet to catch them all.

The net gun is built largely out of PVC pipe; the air tank — filled via a tire valve — uses adapter fittings to shrink it down to a 1″ sprinkler valve, with an air gun to act as a trigger. The net launcher is made of four lengths of pipe bent with the use …read more

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A Next-Level Home-Built Flight Simulator

Every hobby needs to have a few people who take it just a little too far. In particular, the aviation hobbies – Radio control flying, FPV multicopter racing, and the like – seem to inspire more than their fair share of hard-core builds. In witness whereof we present this over-the-top home-brew flight simulator.

His wife and friends think he’s crazy, and we agree. But [XPilotSimPro] is that special kind of crazy that it takes to advance the state of the art, and we applaud him for that. A long-time fan of flight simulator games, he was lucky enough to log …read more

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The Potowitzer: A Rapid Fire Potato Cannon

If you’ve ever fired a potato cannon, you’ll know that they are a raucous good time, but are somewhat clumsy to reload after each shot. Seeing an opportunity to improve on the design and minimize the delay between launches, [Danger First] have concocted a fast reloading potato cannon — or should I say — Potowitzer.

The key here is that they’ve gone through the extra effort of designing and building honest-to-goodness artillery rounds for their Potowitzer’s manual breech-loading mechanism. Foregoing the inconsistency of potatoes, they’ve 3D printed a bevy of bullets and sealed them with propane gas into PVC pipe …read more

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