Formed PVC airfoil blades?

[makenzie71]

I lke playing with PVC and a lot of my projects require heating and reforming the material.  My favorite is building bows (see below).  So long as you're staying under 4ft long and around 3” diameter it should be manageable with just a heat gun and some patience.  It would be pretty straight forward to build a wooden jig to duplicate your twist, a dowel or flat piece of wood inserted into the pipe during forming would maintain your airfoil.  You could trim your trailing edge or keep it flat to suit whatever your desired performance.  They'd be heaver than fiber blades i think, but you could make them at home with some time snd $5 worth of pipe.

All speculation on my prat, but it's something i'm going to have a go at.  I'm just curious if anyone else has tried pulling it off.

PVC bow i made for my little girl.  This is a 3/4 sch40 piece that's 22” long with 6” static tips.  It pulled 28lbs at 27”.  So i think the material should be plenty strong and resilient for the application, and with god paint and sealing should be reasonably weatherproof.

[MagnetJuice]

I see no reason why blades made out of PVC will not work. You already have experience shaping it, so it should be easy for you to do.

The main drawback that I see is that the brittle temperature of PVC -5F (-15 C). Another thing is that PVC is not UV resistant, but that can be remedied with a good coating.

You can put a piece of steel electrical conduit inside to give it strength. That material is light, strong and cheap.

It would be good to be able to find alternate ways for DIY's to build blades.

By the way, tell your girl to put on some boots before she goes in the woods to hunt for elk 

Ed

[makenzie71]

Yeah I wouldn't run them in any kind of extreme cold...not after a season, anyway.  I've had some of my bows out in sub-0 weather without a lot of drama, but I sure didn't try and string/unstring them in that condition.

She wears shorts, a sweater, missmatched socks and one shoe but she's stacking arrows so I let her rock it anyway she wants lol

[electrondady1]

when she gets a bit bigger she  might need a pony   https://youtu.be/Vt7Gs2EIR-E    the ancestors will be so proud

[makenzie71]

ugh I can't afford her to turn into a "horse" girl lol

[SparWeb]

Already dangerous at that age!

Would you like to post some details of how you made it?
https://www.fieldlines.com/index.php/board,46.0.html

[makenzie71]

Yeah I'm working on a video of one now per a request on another forum.  They really only take about an hour to finish from raw materials straight through to sending arrows downrange, but finding that hour and then actually getting a good video of the process is complicated haha

I'm also working on the blade idea.  I'm setting up a plywood form that'll give me a flat mounted area with a twist that starts at 22° off the hub and then is...something less, maybe 10°...at the tips.  It'll be a 28" blade made from 3" sch40.  That should give me a blade that's about 5" wide at the base.  I'm not sure if that's really wide enough, but it'll let me test theory and see how the blades look coming out of the form.  From there I'll be able to trim the trailing edge and form the foil.

It'll probably be a while before I can really dedicate a lot of time to the blades but I'll have it done sometime this winter.

[SparWeb]

...a flat mounted area with a twist that starts at 22° off the hub and then is...something less, maybe 10°...at the tips. 

Alton Moore's online calculator can help you there.