I was bored one day so I decided to see if I could fashion an adjustable fishing rod mount for my kayak out of some scrap PVC I had laying around.
I used about 18″ of some 1.5″ pipe I had to make this rod holder.
To be honest, I wasn’t too sure if this project would turn out well. I was more or less using it as an experiment with PVC material.
If you look through the photos you can see how I got to the finished product.
There was a lot of heating, bending, re-heating, re-bending to get to the end product. It’s fairly difficult to get the PVC to a bending state without burning. The trick is high heat moving quickly. If the heat gun sits still on one single area it will start burning the PVC fairly quickly.
I wanted to paint it, but paint and PVC never really last a long time. But the purple PVC primer lasts forever. So I googled how to dye PVC and I ended up doing this: mixed a pack of black (yes, black. The final product is a dark blue, but I used black dye.) RIT powdered fabric dye with a mixture of acetone and hot water. I put the dye concoction and the PVC parts in a large zip lock bag and let it simmer for a while.
After letting the PVC sit in the dye bath for maybe like 30min, I took it all out and rinsed it off. I did a destruction test with a scrap piece of PVC and the only way I was able to remove the coloring was by actually cutting and removing plastic. There was no noticeable film or covering that could be scratched off like paint would produce. In the future I will definitely be using this method for coloring PVC material.
I used a scrap piece of UHMW plastic to use as a mounting base for the rod mount. I used the tried and true method of trial & error to produce a cardboard template for cutting the UHMW to fit the kayak. I have the UHMW attached to the kayak with stainless eyebolts and wing nuts. That way I can quickly and easily remove the rod mount when necessary.
