Wednesday, April 24, 2013

My First PVC Pipe Sword

Tim Piatek, one of my fellow PVC bowyers on Youtube, has been coming up with all kinds of ideas for PVC bows. He seems to have a fascination with the bows of the Ottoman Turks and his style has been greatly influenced by them. On top of his many bows, he's been playing around with the idea of PVC for prop, practice, and costume weapons.

Tim posted a tutorial on making a short sword which inspired me to try out a PVC sword of my own. Here is the result.


I was pleasantly suprised by how good this short sword feels in the hand. It has good balance and while the blade is pretty flexible, it is still rigid enough for swinging around and blowing up watermelons. Since the sword came out so nice, I had to make a handle and sheath for it.

The blade started as 2 feet of 3/4 inch schedule 40 electrical conduit, the handle is 3/4 inch schedule 40, and the sheath is 3/4 inch SDR-21 thin wall PVC pipe. I really like how it came out and will probably be making more in the future.

If you want to check out Tim's work, his channel is here. He's also authored and self-published a Kindle e-book on making PVC swords. Being an author myself, I like to support others who write and publish. You can find his book on Amazon here. While it is fairly short, it has a good amount of information, pictures, and instruction to guide you through building your own PVC sword as well as tips and suggestion to modifying the finished sword.

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