Pixel Candy Cane Build Project

[tfischer]

Come with me, on a multi-month project where I attempt to build a double-line of 24 pixel candy canes. Along the way, we'll run into problems, troubleshoot them (hopefully), and if the good guys win, we'll have a new display item for Christmas 2026.

First, lets have some background:

Plymouth Lights, my display, went animated in 2003, the year after we first moved here. From the very first year, we had a row of candy canes on each side of our driveway. That first year we had only 40 AC channels. 32 of them were dedicated to the mega tree, Two of the 8 remaining were dedicated to a row each of the driveway canes.



Incidentally those canes came from Mark Obermiller, who created one of the first large music-synced Christmas displays in the world, in southern Indiana near Louisville, KY. He was selling his display as he had to stop for personal reasons, and I ended up with his large Remember Jesus sign (which we still use, and used up 2 more of those AC channels) as well as a bunch of these canes.

In 2014, I got some sexy new Lynx Express (DMX AC) controllers, which allowed me to put each cane on its own individual channel. That made it so that instead of just winking back and forth on the sides, they could now chase front to back and do other cool effects.



Pretty good. But these canes have issues:

• They're incandescent, meaning they burn out and require regular maintenance.
• They're fragile. They're made of quite brittle plastic and like to crack, especially in the cold
• Since they are set up on the sides of our driveway, they always get buried in snow. Even though I try to prevent it, the snowblower always tosses too much snow in their direction (gotta put it somewhere). Since they're fragile, this is a problem removing them at the end of the season. And the wiring harnesses I built 12 years ago to make them independently controllable are pretty fragile as well. Each season it seems I have to repair those harnesses, no matter how careful I am tearing down.
• Our dog generally leaves our display alone. But one year, some of the canes got so buried that only the very tops were poking out. The dog took this as a challenge, and started digging/chewing/pulling them out. In pieces. Destroying 6 or 8 of the canes.

Anyway, after seeing this thread here on DIYC, and coming off a successful project updating our long-standing spiral mini trees from AC to pixel, I decided this would be a great project for 2026.

 

[angus40]

Hi .
Have you started this yet ?

 

[tfischer]

Ok so now we had a project in mind. How to proceed?

Well as I mentioned in the previous post, user @OptykMuse did a similar project, described in this thread which was my primary inspiration. But... I decided to try a few changes:

1. OptykMuse used hot sand as a mechanism for bending the tubing without collapsing it. In my mind, this sounded messy and frustrating at best, and possibly dangerous, knowing what a klutz I can be. I had visions of pouring scalding hot sand not down the tube, but down my arm.
2. I did some googling, and found you could get bending springs on Amazon for really cheap. These springs serve the same purpose: to fill inside the tube and keep it from collapsing.
3. The same googling, as well as some heart-to-heart chats with ChatGPT and Claude, told me that I should be able to heat up PEX to no more than 200F and get it pliable enough to bend. Well... that's within the realm of boiling water! That sounds a lot easier than hot sand.
4. OptykMuse built a cool wood form for doing the bending. I would do the same.

So, let's get on that form.

Scrounging around the garage for some scrap wood, I found some 2x4s but no 2x6's or better. No worries, I'll just pull out my trusty doweling jig and join them together:



Next, I got my lovely wife to trace out one of the existing canes onto this block, and then cut it out on the band saw:



I cut out the inner plug piece as well, in case it becomes useful (Narrator: It turns out it DID become useful). Here, in this pic, I test the old-style cane with the form:

 

[tfischer]

Hi .
Have you started this yet ?

I started on Saturday, then ran into some roadblocks.

I have more posts to document the progress up to where I'm at In Real Life but I'll have to do those later (as my employer likes it better when I actually work during the workday lol).

In the meantime, I documented some of the anti-progress on the original thread. But I've come a little bit further since that point also.

 

[angus40]

I laughed when you said real life ! I've lost count as to how many times I have heard films folk say real world .

I will be following your progress on this as i have a roll of pex kicking around .
In the meanwhile I'll play around with a 3D model as a stress reliever .

Looking forward to seeing how you make out with this .

 

[tfischer]

Episode 3:

OK, so now we have a form that will hold the cane's shape. Next we needed the PEX.

Now this is where I have to admit I came into this project knowing nothing about PEX, other than it's used for plumbing instead of copper in a lot of new builds now. I've never worked with it. I didn't know much about its properties. This will become important as the story unfolds in future episodes.

What I *have* done in the past was work with PVC. Way back in 2002, just a few months after we moved here, we lit up the yard, non-animated, for the first time. Our old house had a split rail fence, and I liked the idea of having a "barrier" between viewers and the displays, so they didn't just walk right into the display. Our new house had no such barrier. So I decided to make a "candy cane fence", creating a bunch of "larger" candy canes, about 4' tall. I was younger and dumber back then, not considering things like plastic fumes, and I used our gas range's broiler setting to soften each pipe in our kitchen, then twisting it around a small bucket. It was tricky to not collapse the tube, but it mostly worked OK. We then strung lights between them and that was our "fence". This only lasted a few years before we upgraded to arches.

Anyway, because of this, I was pretty familiar with the properties of PVC and how it would bend, and assumed PEX would behave similarly. More foreshadowing here.

But back to our quest to buy PEX. I went to Home Depot, and found that the sold it by the roll or by the stick:



It's a little cheaper by the roll. But I wanted to avoid having pre-curled pipe, since the majority of a candy cane is a straight side. Incidentally, even the "straight" pipes aren't very straight. But, I came home with a 10' section, and cut it into 3 40-inch sections. The second picture below shows one of the sections, sitting next to my bending spring. I tied a string to the spring, so that I could pull it out if it got pushed all the way inside.

 

[tfischer]

Episode 4:

Now it was time to put the plan into action! Could we make a prototype cane, or three? Could we prove out our methodology would work so I could make 24 canes, and maybe a few spares?

Well first, let's get on that boiling water. Or near-boiling... I had read that I shouldn't heat it beyond 200 degrees, so I used that as my starting point.

For the vessel, I used our propane turkey fryer. This has a large, maybe 5 gallon fryer pot that I filled nearly to the top with water. I used our remote BBQ thermometer so that we could monitor the temperature from the warm(er) garage:


At last we got it up to 200 degrees. I dunked the pipe section in, gave it maybe 30 seconds. Pulled it out, tried to bend it with my gloved hands. Yeah, right, it didn't even dent it. Incidentally this PEX has a pressure rating for 200 degrees printed right on it, so that made me doubtful, but my AI friends were so clear that even 160 degrees might be enough to bend it.

So we left it in longer. Still nothing.



So then I cranked up the fryer so that we got the water to a nice boil. After several tries, I just left a pipe out there in the pot, unattended for a good 15 or 20 minutes.

With many of these longer attempts, I was able to bring the pipe back in the garage, force it into the form, but it did not begin to follow the candy cane contours, I used the "inner plug" part of the form and tried to force it into position with clamps. I was able to get it to bend into "almost" the cane shape. But as soon as I took it out of the form, even after letting it cool for a long time, It would just spring back to nearly straight. Like maybe 10-degrees-off-of-completely-straight straight.

After trying this a few times, the force of the PEX, combined with the force of the bending spring, which also wanted to be straight, actually broke my form.

And speaking of the bending spring, it was clear that if I DID get the cane to stay into its position, there was absolutely NO way it was going to be removable.

And that was the point I stopped for the day, and wrote a whiny post in the other thread about my findings and misfortunes.

In the next episodes we'll look at more research I did, and a few more experiments. Would those experiments have better luck? Well as they say, 'tune in next time...'

 

[ErnieHorning]

Kind of like a Soap Opera where you tune in 6 months later and you didn't miss anything.

This might turn into a Myth Busters episode where you light it on fire so it finally bends.

Got my fingers crossed.

 

[Lectric Lar]

This is fabulous! Looking forward to the next installment.

 

[tfischer]

Episode 5 - I'm per-PEXed:

After the failed experiments dramatized in the previous episode, it was clear that PEX wasn't going to bend with the level of heat I was giving it. But how much would it take?

Ernie mentioned going "Mythbuster Style" and that's essentially what I did. I took a propane torch, and put the PEX right up into it.

PVC would have quickly collapsed, folded, and bubbled into a toxic smoke and caught on fire. PEX? virtually no reaction.

If I held it in one place long enough, it would start to smoke, but if I kept it moving back and forth, it didn't harm it at all. I avoided making smoke as I don't want to breathe toxic vapors.

So, I heated it up in one spot, and bent it over. Brought it inside to run cold water on it to "set" it.

That actually worked, and that bend has remained. Not directly useful for cane production, but more information.



So, could we replicate this for the cane hook? I took the other end of that same PEX pipe and heated it with the torch. Got it good and hot. Put the bending spring into it, and heated it some more.

I then coaxed it into the form (which I had repaired) and clamped it in. After a few minutes, I realized I probably needed to retrieve the bending spring or it might be entombed forever. So I pulled it back out, and the PEX expanded back into a straighter shape. I removed the spring, but this time I was able to heat it back up again, and bend it back into the form without crushing the tube, since it was already partially bent. I left it there, overnight.

The next morning, I pulled it out of the form, and lo and behold, I pulled it out and it was a perfectly formed candy cane. Exactly what I wanted.

I got excited, and took another piece of the PEX, and did the same thing. This time, I wanted to see if I could leave it in the form a shorter time. I left it in, maybe 30 minutes. Came back out, pulled it out of the form. Another perfect* cane! Is this too good to be true? (Narrator: It was indeed too goo... Me: Shut Up, Narrator! I'm telling this story...)

*actually I kind of rushed that one and it had a small kink in it. But that was my technique...

I was so glorious that I forgot to take pictures.

IMAGINE PHOTO HERE.

After I had put that original cane in the form to set overnight, I turned off the garage heater. I didn't bother heating the garage back up for the couple things I did the next morning. So the canes were quite cold (a bit under freezing). Would they hold their shape if warmed up? I brought them inside and hung them on the railing. Two canes with almost the exact same shape as the store-bought ones I was replacing.

I came back a couple hours later to look at them. And this is what I saw:



The first cane straightened out quite a bit. The second cane straightened out even more. <insert great cries of sadness>

You know how they say elephants never forget? I'm not sure about that, but what I now know is, PEX never forgets. It remembers. It remembers how it was born into this world, extruded into a wonderful, tubular, STRAIGHT shape.

Like a middle-aged dude longing for the 'good ol' days' of his childhood, when they went out to play until the streetlights came on, if you remove PEX from its nostalgic extruded beginning, it wants it back. It demands it back. You can bend it, heat it, beat it up, But eventually, it's going to try its darndest to get back to that shape, at least as close as it can. The harsh fold was a little too much for it, but any kind of smooth bend, it just straightens right back out, especially if it warms up.

At least that's what PEX-B does.

Wait, what's this "B" you speak of?

Well, we're getting a little ahead of ourselves now. Tune in next time...

 

[BillW]

On the edge of my seat waiting for the next installment of how to beat PEX tubing into submission or not!

 

[angus40]

I have a suspicion that only toxic vapors sealed inside the pex while it is held in the cane shape will be the solution .
Altering the developed memory of the pex. heat alone will not be sufficient . If u duct tape one end and use a squeeze bottle or similar to inject vapor from contact cement or toluene in the open end then quickly ducttape the open end trapping the vapor .

Poly polystyrene is another altering vapor . Note that these vapors are heavier than air .

just my 02 ........

 

[ErnieHorning]

I have a suspicion that only toxic vapors sealed inside the pex while it is held in the cane shape will be the solution .

So finally, letting the smoke out will be a good thing.

 

[tfischer]

Great, now I need to teach my candy canes to huff

I'm actually setting up yet another experiment as I type this. Not huffing-based, though lol.

 

[MikeKrebs]

Are you looking to put the pixels inside the pipe? Is that why you want pex?

 

[tfischer]

Are you looking to put the pixels inside the pipe? Is that why you want pex?

Correct. I'm looking to use seed pixels inside and have a diffused glow. Pex would be perfect, visually, if I can get it to form properly.

Definitely open to other materials though. In fact I ordered a sample of one tonight to see if that might fare better. More on that once I get it.

 

[tfischer]

Episode 6- Can we reach the A-PEX?

As I was researching my failures with the PEX, I found out there are actually several types of PEX. The one that I had been using is the most common, and the cheapest, and is known as PEX-B. There is also a PEX-A. Could it be that the advice I had seen online was relevant to PEX-A?

Well I had to find out. It turns out Home Depot sells both, but for inexplicable reasons, it's not even next to the PEX-B. It's in the same aisle, but the B is in the middle, and the A was way down a the far end. No wonder I didn't even see it. Also, the PEX-B was just called "PEX" on the shelf tag, whereas the A was called "PEX-A".



So I had to replicate everything I did in Episode 3: Pulled out the turkey fryer. Rigged up the thermometer. Waited for everything to heat up. Soaked the PEX-A in boiling water for varying lengths of time.

1. While it was the tiniest bit more flexible than the PEX-B, it still wasn't nearly enough. I pulled out my heat gun and got it considerably hotter, and forced it into the form.
   
   Let it cool for awhile. Popped it out, and it expanded some, but still remained basically cane-shaped:
   
   
   
   It's not the shape I was hoping for, but may be passable? And maybe if I get better heat on it, I can get it to stay closer to the desired shape?
   
   Like before, I brought it inside and it has essentially stayed the same over the past week. Success? Maybe partially. But I've always stored my lighted canes up in the garage attic... would they tolerate that kind of summer heat? Still to be determined, but I have my doubts- would love to find out they would though.
   
   So what have we learned?

1. Boiling water just isn't going to cut it to bend these canes.
2. PEX-A *might* be a little better than PEX-B to keep its shape. Which is strange, because further online research claims that A has a better memory.
3. I need to do some experiments with getting these quite a bit hotter to bend.

And one last thing learned? Maybe, just maybe, I should look at additional materials besides PEX for this project. But can we do that without completely blowing the budget?

Tune in next time, for another exciting episode...

 

[scottmcm]

Loving this story! Now I feel inspired to go build something.

 

[tfischer]

Loving this story! Now I feel inspired to go build something.

That's the hope! To get people chiming in, building their own things, starting their own saga thread lol.

 

[tfischer]

Episode 7: Is this project toast?

In our last exciting episode, we learned the following:

1. Boiling water just isn't going to cut it to bend these canes.
2. PEX-A *might* be a little better than PEX-B to keep its shape. Which is strange, because further online research claims that A has a better memory.
3. I need to do some experiments with getting these quite a bit hotter to bend.

Knowing that, I had to think about the best way to get the pipes hotter to bend. Everything I read online said "use a heat gun" but my experiments showed that this would be along, tedious, and perhaps error-prone (with plastic scorching) process. I am many things, but a patient person is not one of them, and if I'm going to build 24 or 27 of these canes, the tedium of slowly heating each cane for 10 minutes or more would be unbearable.

I kept coming back to an oven. But these pipes are 40 inches long. When I built PVC canes years ago, I just stuck the end of them inside the gas oven we had at the time. That worked, but it was about controllable- sometimes the plastic scorched a little. Sometimes I didn't get it quite hot enough to bend well.

Ideally I'd have an oven I could poke the pipe into through a hole. But I couldn't go out and buy a full size range just to drill a hole in it. But what about a toaster oven?

Toaster ovens are pretty cheap, but they're also pretty small. But my mind kept returning to it, and I checked Craigslist and Marketplace to see if I could find a cheap one. Also I posted out on our local Buy Nothing group to see if anyone wanted to give one away. I didn't expect that to happen, but lo and behold I got offers from two different people! I'm cheap, so getting a free toaster oven is perfect.

So my next thought was, I need to drill holes on both sides of it. Then I can extend the pipe through the side, and heat it up bit by bit. Like a heat gun, I can move the pipe in and out and heat it up gradually. It would still tedious, but not quite as bad as the heat gun.



My son is home from college this week, and helped do the actual drilling. We actually had to drill 4 holes. On the left side, there was just a small gap between the outer shell and the inner oven shell, but still needed to have the holes drilled separately. On the right side is where the controls are, and the gap is bigger, maybe 2 inches or so. We drilled holes there too. For what it's worth, I first took the toaster apart to make sure we had a space where we weren't going to drill into wires or anything important.

We then used some pie-pan foil to create little "tunnels" between each pair of holes. Foil tape on the outside cleaned things up and held them in place (I don't think the foil tape is rated for the interior temps so we didn't use it inside the oven)



Now we have a chamber where we can set a precise* temperature, and stick a piece of pipe into and get it good and hot.

*as precise as a cheap toaster oven control can provide anyway



We tried bending a couple of canes. I found that by leaving a section in the oven, set at 400, for about 5 minutes, it would heat that section up pretty good and make it "droopy" but not enough to collapse or anything. We then slid it to the other extreme of the section that needed bending (about 5 inches difference) and gave it about 5 minutes. Then we spend a few minutes reheating the first end again, and moving the cane in and out to heat the full section (which is about 15 inches long)

The first cane, I just bent by hand with my gloved hands. I wanted to do a "too tight" bend to see how well it would hold up.

The second cane we actually did in the form.

We cooled/set the bends by running them under cold water. After a few hours, they seemed to keep their shape.

I wanted to see if storing them in the hot attic would straighten them back out, so I fired up our real oven to 170, and set them inside for 5-10 minutes. The plastic got very hot, way hotter than I'd expect them to get in the attic. The Pex-A one with the tight hand bend didn't seem to change at all. The Pex-B one that we did in the form straightened out the tiniest bit (I had the hook doubling back more than it shows here), but it's still viable I think.



So once again, what have we learned?

• With the right amount of heat and control, we can probably proceed on this project with PEX
• PEX-A does seem to hold its shape better than PEX-B. It's also slightly more translucent, which is a plus. And the cost difference is only maybe 40 cents per cane.

I have one last experiment I want to try before committing to this method. I have purchased a sample of another material that would be simply stunning and also very durable and wouldn't have any memory. But... it's around twice the price, too large for my bending spring, and might not bend as easily (that's why I need to experiment).

But... we can explore that in the next episode.