Thomas Tilley’s PVC page begins with a reasonable question — what can you make from cheap water pipe? — and then answers it with approximately everything.
Visit Thomas Tilley’s PVC project archive
The page dates the collection from 2006 onward and explains why blue PVC became the default material. Living in Thailand, Tilley found pipe and fittings inexpensive, abundant and easy to modify. That turned an ordinary plumbing material into a rapid-prototyping system.
The resulting list is magnificent.
There are soccer goals, a cricket wicket, a basketball hoop, bookshelf supports, a laptop stand, a music stand, hockey sticks, shelves, a train whistle and the obligatory marshmallow shooter.
Then things escalate.
PVC meets hacked USB hardware
Tilley built a Tron light-cycle controller from PVC pipe, motorcycle hand grips, push buttons and a mercury switch, connecting the whole thing to a computer through a hacked USB joypad.
A student responded that racing games were more interesting, so Tilley built a PVC racing-car controller. That became a wheel-less go-kart frame with steering, pedals and hacked joystick electronics. He later built another so two people could race side by side through a laptop and data projector.
His REAL-Tron setup went further: actual motorcycles on center stands became game controllers. Buttons mounted to the handlebars handled turning while a mercury switch detected throttle movement for boost.
For Puzzle Bobble, he constructed pedestal-style coffee-grinder controls. A stripped optical mouse inside a plastic container sensed rotation while an arcade button fired the bubbles.
For BZFlag, he helped university engineering students modify a chair with PVC steering levers and optical mice underneath.
The page is valuable because it does not just show finished objects. It records pipe diameters, connector counts, switch choices, failed approaches and improvised fixes. One project uses a broken hot-glue gun as the trigger mechanism for a homemade Wii Zapper. Another repurposes PVC projector cages because dropping somebody else’s projector onto a virtual pinball table is apparently considered undesirable.
This is the kind of independent technical writing that search engines are unusually good at preserving when the page itself survives. The projects are too weirdly specific for a normal magazine archive, yet exactly specific enough to help somebody attempting a similar hack years later.
The Ancient Web was full of people publishing because they had made something.
Sometimes that something was a website.
Sometimes it was four motorcycles wired into Tron with plumbing supplies.