stars

Keebler

Keebler

New member
i have taken an idea i read about here and modified it to fit my needs.

i took a 10' piece of 1/2" gray electrical PVC and i formed a jig of a star.
(pics to follow)
i make 5 stars VERY fast just wrapping the heated PVC around the bolts in my jig.
i used a paint gun to heat the bends till pliable. when the star was cooled, i removed the bolts and lifted the star out, placed it on a piece of rebar and air brushed the star flat black (very cheap way to make effect look great at night)


then i sprayed them flat black (to not reflect light)

tomorrow i will string lights on them and run "patch" wire to the base.

i am making 10 of these that will chase around my yard and/or up to the mega tree :)

pics will be posted soon
 
thank you

yes, i took a 100ct string and cut it in half.
enough lights for two stars :)

very easy project and adds TONS to my show :)
 
Is there any chance that I could get the measurements for that PVC star jig? I was thinking of making a few of those for this year and yours seem to be very well made.

Thanks
 
Glad I found this thread. I just made three 2' wide stars in about 30 minutes. Simple method and they look great.
 
Perhaps you could post pics of the finished project and your jig Wilkija ;)


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starJig.jpg
Can't show the actual jig, but it was just a piece of plywood with holes mounted in the red colored circles. I then layed a piece of 10' PVC on the top screw about 3' up the PVC. Heat the PVC at the top screw and it will become pliable enough to bend down to the next lower screw. The PVC then goes under that screw, heated and back up to the next outer screw. I got about halfway through the start and started on the 3' section at the top and came around the other way. Where the ends meet up, I just slipped/caulked a piece of 1/2" PVC over the 1/4" star. (maybe it was 1/2" star and 3/4" slip).

Finished products -
stars.jpg

Creating the jib and stars took all of ~30 minutes. I wrapped the stars with 1 strand of 50 LEDs.
 
I know one other trick for bending pvc is to fill it with sand before heating. In boy scouts we made snow shoes this way. We filled sections of pvc with sand, put them in a household oven, then bent them through a jig. I also know greenlee makes a hotbox or pvc heater. They also have caps that can be put on the ends, to trap the air preventing the pipe from collapsing. Some rental yards will carry theses products.
 
duane.mosley said:
how big of a star do you get with a 10' stick of pvc?
Click to expand...

I'm not in a position to draw this out or crunch numbers. Without drawing it out and doing the math I'm guessing about 2.5 feet top to bottom.

With a five point star you will have 10 sections between bends. View each point as being formed by placing two 30, 60, 90 Deg triangles together. The longest side being the hypotenuse, the shortest side being "a" and the remaining being "b".

Each length of section will then be about 1 foot long on the hypotenuse. Because the star has one point up and one point down, plus the amount of the "a" lengths for the point to the side (being roughly 6 inches total).

Add it all up and there's the very roughly derived number of 2.5 feet, plus or minus a few inches in rather direction.

Of course, I am using the length of the hypotenuse for height and not the length of "b", couple that with my estimate of length "a" multiplied twice (once for each right angle triangle pointing to the side, previously mentioned), means if you are looking to put this inside of something or require specific numbers then it will need to be more accurately calculated.

If you are just wondering for the sake of visualizing how it will look then that should get you close enough.


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