Today's gonna be the first of a two-part video
showing how to make a person-safe set of bow and arrows
that you can use to play tag with your friends.
[Captions by Judy V. at Y Translator] [Music]
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For this project, we're using some 3/4 inch schedule 40 conduit PVC.
It's almost exactly the same as the white PVC,
but since this is not designed to be buried,
it's more sunlight resistant.
These fiberglass driveway markers are designed to stab into the ground
to give yourself a little additional visibility for the edge of a driveway,
usually.
Here's the basic idea.
Some fiberglass rods will be cut to length,
secured together, and fit inside a length of PVC 2.
A paracord bowstring will then be fit into some notches,
carved into the ends of the PVC.
Let's start by taking our PVC pipe, and cutting it to 5 feet in length.
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Overall, we're going to want four fiberglass rods in our bow.
One will be just under 60 inches,
one will be 48 inches,
and two of them will be 24 inches.
Our whole PVC pipe is about 5 feet long,
and our longest fiberglass rod,
we want to be about 1 inch short of either end.
So, let's take 2 inches off, and they get 58 inches long.
When cutting fiberglass,
you want to make sure you're cutting slowly and carefully,
so you don't get a lot of splintering.
To help reduce splintering even further,
I'm going to wrap our fiberglass in a piece of duct tape before I cut it.
We've got two driveway markers that are 48 inches long.
That's just the right size for one of them,
the other one we need to cut nicely in half.
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After cutting that in half,
we now have our 5-foot length, our 4 -foot length and two 2-foot lengths.
Make sure it's got the centers of these all lined up.
We now want to use a little bit of duct tape
to tape around the very center, and hold all these rods together.
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These four fiberglass rods bound together
are what's going to give our bow it's spring power.
Now, when we pull against our PVC, instead of just bending in half,
It should arch nicely, and give our string some spring.
The four rods should fit fairly snugly down inside the tube,
and right where they're taped together,
there should be enough friction that it doesn't slide unless you push it.
We've got a nice flexible rod with a lot of spring to it,
and what we need to do now is add a string.
Our PVC isn't going to do a very good job of holding onto any bowstring right now.
I'm going to try to file a shape about like this.
So, let's take a round file,
and carve some angled notches into the top and bottom
that our string can grip on to.
With this shape, when our bow is curved,
that should be pretty much in line with the direction of the string.
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We need to tie two knots in our string, so that the loops on both ends
will hold securely,
but not have so much slack that the bow straightens out when we're not using it.
Let's fold our paracord over,
and use a Figure-eight knot to make a loop that will be strong,
and large enough to fit over the top of our PVC.
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By attaching the string onto one side of the bow and bending it,
we're able to mark approximately where on the paracord
we want the other loop to go.
This is not necessarily going to be exactly the right spot
because after attaching our string to our bow,
the stretching action may make it a little bit too loose,
and it may tighten up the knots more, giving a little more slack into our string.
But we'll start with this, and adjust from there.
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Not bad. Not bad at all.
Let's just trim up the extra paracord,
and we should be able to give our bow a test fire.
We have approximately 57 inches between one end of our bow and the other,
Let's just mark right on the center on the string
that will let us know where to be putting the knock of our arrows.
We're going to be going over how to make these person-safe arrows in our next video,
but for now I'm just going to take one and see how it fires.
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Beautiful.
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Great hang time.
Our bow and arrow is always working great.
I do just want to add a little bit of decoration on to this
because you know, we like adding decoration to stuff.
I'm not going to put anything right where I'm gripping
because I feel like that would just get worn off over time.
But I think the rest of the bow, I'll try and add a little bit of color to it.
[Music]
Our bow is built, and it is working great.
We've got incredible range.
I think I can shoot these arrows like 100 feet.
A quick note about the bow,
if you leave it strung all the time,
the PVC and the fiberglass rods inside will start to bend,
and then, you'll lose a lot of power.
So, anytime you're not actively using it,
you should take the bow string off.
In our next video,
we're going to be showing you how to make these arrows,
so they are safe and they can't hit you, even if they hit you in to face.
The goal is so that no matter how you shoot someone with these arrows,
they're going to be fine.
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