How to Build a 40 Pound No Heat PVC Bow for Less Than $7

Posted by Saint.357 11/23/2013

Hey fellow backyard bowyers!

Yesterday we built the Zombie Slayer bow, a solid and quiet 43 pound bow perfect for dispatching zombies. While it's a great bow to have, sometimes time isn't always on your side. Even without painting or finishing, the Zombie Slayer takes about an hour or more to build. At around 5-15 minutes of work time, this bow is great for making quick backups or for building an armory for you and your trusted survivors.

Unlike the Zombie Slayer, this bow requires no heat and no shaping. It makes use of fiberglass rods assembled into a simple bundle bow inside of the pipe to distribute stress away from the handle and evenly across both limbs. It's a solid performer, shooting more than its weight and at par with typical wooden selfbows (100+ draw weight = speed of 10 gpp arrow).

Since it doesn't require a lot of "by eye" work, everything can be done separately or in assembly-line fashion and each bow comes out almost identical to every other bow. This makes this bow great for backups, as each bow will shoot identically to the last. One thing to mention is that a fully round 3/4" pipe bow at 1" wide will shoot just as accurately as a flattened and formed 1" pipe bow at 1" wide.

Now this bow does cost more in materials than the Zombie Slayer or most other one-piece PVC pipe bows because of the fiberglass rods. It costs about 3 times as much to make as the Slayer, but you make up for it in time and tool cost. Where this bow really only needs a $3.00 saw blade, the Slayer needs a heat source, flattening jig, saw, and a knife/scraper at the very least.

Even so, the materials of one bow come out to $6.40, and less than $10.00 even with the saw blade. There are some price and material lists below. Keep in mind that the prices here are based on when I bought them a week ago, and prices will probably go up as time goes on.

Thanks for watching and enjoy!

Material cost for one bow (Rounded up to the $0.10) -
$1.50 - 5ft long, 3/4" Schedule 40 PVC Pipe
$4.00 - Two 4ft long, 5/16" Fiberglass Rods (Driveway Markers -http://www.lowes.com/pd_222125-37672-...)
$0.50 - 7 yards of Duct Tape
$0.40 - 5.5 Feet of Poly Paracord (http://www.homedepot.com/p/Crown-Bolt...)
Total Cost - $6.40

Cost of the tools I used - 
$3.00 - Rod/Tile Saw Blade (http://www.lowes.com/pd_190139-16878-...)
$5.00 - Factory 2nd Spyderco Tenacious (Any knife or pair of scissors will work. You could even use the tile saw if you wanted to.)
$0.00 - Reclaimed wood dowel (Any stick 1 foot long or more would work, even an arrow)
Total Cost - $8.00

Cost of all the materials
$3.00 - 10ft long, 3/4" Schedule 40 PVC Pipe (Can make 2 bows)
$4.00 - Two 4ft long, 5/16" Fiberglass Rods (Can make 1 bow)
$4.00 - 55 Yard Roll of Duct Tape (Can make 8 bows)
$3.00 - 50 Feet of Paracord (Can make 9 bows)
Total Cost - $14.00

The cost of materials for one bow plus the tile saw (which is probably the only tool you'd need to buy, though even hacksaw blades can be used instead) is $9.40, so still under $10.00. If you buy a single hacksaw blade instead, the total would be under $8.00.