Simple PVC Pipe Bows: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Forming PVC Pipe into Effective and Compact Archery Bows
Dear Reader,    Archery is an amazingly rewarding sport and for many including myself, a way of life. There are many ways to get into archery, many different styles of bow and many reasons to shoot. All aspects of archery should be respected and each is rewarding.    Within these pages you will find instructions and pictures showing how I build simple bows from PVC pipe. These bows are designed to be simple, utilizing only a single PVC pipe for a single bow. Yet while simple, they offer power and performance comparable to bows that require more work and equipment to build.    While PVC is more forgiving and more easily formed into an efficient working bow than any other material, the methods explained here are not automatic or effortless. A PVC bow requires your patience and respect, just like any other bow. Rushing into it, being ill prepared or skimping on methods may result in failure.    Before I immersed myself in building bows from PVC pipe, I shaped and crafted bows from single staves of wood, multiple laminations of wood and bows of wood and fiberglass. Even after building bows for years they aren't easy. Sure it doesn't take nearly as much time and I've developed a feel for them that makes the most tedious processes go quickly, but they aren't easy to make in any way.    As a bowyer who has built hundreds of bows, I still have trouble making them all go the way I want all the time. My success rate isn't 100% and I don't think it ever will be. I work with several thousand dollars in equipment that makes building a bow in an hour possible. Yet add in the time it takes to let wood dry , glue to set, finish to cure and the constant adjustment required for each bow to reach maturity and it can takes months for a bow to go from raw wood to finished product.    As a beginner with few tools and no previous experience, it can take days if not weeks of work to reduce a stave into a working bow. The process of teaching wood to bend alone can take many hours of seemingly endless toil and adjustment. It's not difficult work and is definitely worth it, but it is strenuous and tedious work. Even after all this, a beginner with no formal instruction would be lucky to have a bow that shoots faster than 100 feet per second with a matched arrow.    Even after all the work I put into them, my selfbows don't regularly exceed 150 fps and the fastest bows barely exceed 170 fps. While some of my laminated bows do reach into the 200's, they are the exception rather than the rule. My first performance PVC bow, which took a few hours of shaping and tweaking before I had any experience with it and no guide on the subject existed, still to this day exceeds 140 fps with a matched arrow.    Over the last year I have received countless testimonial from happy owners of PVC bows they built with their own hands. It isn't easy but it's doable and more accessible than virtually any other material for the beginner. With a little practice and patience, bows that rival even commercial bows in performance and speed are possible with few tools, PVC pipe and raw determination.-Nick Tomihama