Summer Vacation – Build a PVC Pipe Bike Rack With The Kids

The bikes and scooters were driving me bonkers, left all over the yard and garage. I love things we can make from stuff we already have and we have loads of bits of PVC pipe lurking around from our various irrigation efforts. We already have pipe cutters but we did need a couple of the longer long pieces, new glue  and some of the fittings.

Because we already had a lot of the materiels I only spent about $10 but even if you have to buy it all I think it would come in for around $20.

After a trip to Home Depot followed by a lot of very silly pipe related improve, our splendid new bicycle rack was created.

If you have bikes of different sizes and not a lot of space you can vary the distance between the wheel supports

Materials Needed:

• 50′ – 3/4″ Schedule 4o PVC pipe I bought 5×10’
• 20 T-connectors.  I bought a contractors pack of 25
• 14 – 90-degree elbow connectors (elbows). Another contractors pack
• PVC pipe cement (optional)
• PVC pipe cutter or small-toothed handsaw.
• Measuring tape or ruler
• Sharpie
• Spray paint (if you want to color coordinate)

Cut List for PVC pipe:

• (8) – 12″ pieces
• (2) – 23 1/8″ pieces
• (20) – 16″ pieces
• (14 )- 2″ pieces

The kids had fun measuring, the big’un was in charge of the pipe cutter and the little one was in charge of the sharpie .

Cut all the big pieces first, and use the leftover pieces of PVC for your smaller cuts.  Once you have everything cut do a dry run and get everything to fit together before gluing . It should take 5 mins to assemble but the kids were ‘helping’ and loved the pieces of pipe so much they had to build all sorts of other stuff with the pieces first!

I glued some of the pieces together for added stability but left some able to pop apart, so I could change the size as need and make it portable for camping trips (no more bikes dumped on the ground), or you could fit it in the back of a pick up to store bikes.

Have you built anything with PVC ? I’d love to hear your ideas