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• electric drill
• drill press - not essential, but helps a lot
• 7/8-" drill bit
• 7/8" drill bit
• smaller drill bit for screws - 3/32"
• pipe cutter - heavy-duty is best
• paint brush - disposable
• hot-melt glue gun
• scraper

While researching other fence projects, I noted that some folks used a 13/16" drill. They admitted that the fit was tight, and that some amount of hammering was necessary to make the PVC fit in the 1x2s. Others used a 7/8" drill, resulting in a loose, easy fit. This probably cost the completed fence some structural rigidity.

We decided to make a custom drill bit by taking a 7/8" spade bit and touching it up on a grinder to more closely approximate the outer diameter of the PVC pipe. This produced a nice tight permanent fit that did not require hammering.

Unfortunately, you really want the end holes to be a slightly looser fit, because you insert and remove the PVC pipe when you set up and disassemble the fence. Additionally, that pipe is going through two full sets of 1x2. You really want it looser.

Thus we reccommend two drill bits - one slightly smaller that 7/8", for the permanently attached uprights; and one unmodified 7/8" bit for the end holes.

Plenty of PVC pipe here. We bought 10-foot lengths, and cut them in half in the parking lot of Home Depot. We wanted smaller lengths to use anyway, and by cutting them at the store, they fit in the car more easily.

When we built more fence in 2001, a helpful bystander suggested that "You can probably get that in your truck without cutting it up." If you want to play with their minds, mutter "But that's how Dad carried his PVC home in the hatchback! Takes a lot of couplers to put it back together, though!"

Since some of the original pieces weren't quite 10 feet, we decided that 5 feet minus 1/2-inch was a good length to use for the final PVC pieces.

We took a piece of that length as a "gold standard", using it as a guide to trim all the remaining pieces.

There are plenty of tools that will cut PVC tubing nicely. We prefer the squeeze tool made for that purpose, and marketed to those installing sprinklers. Get the heavy-duty model.

The 1x2 wood is drilled in a drill press. We drill 2 pieces at a time. The depth stop on the drill press is set so that the tip of the bit just pokes through the bottom. Then you flip the bottom board over and use the hole to drill through. This avoids chewing up the bottom of the board when the drill breaks through.

Use the 7/8" bit for the two holes at the ends, where you want a looser fit. Use a slightly smaller bit for the holes in the middle.

Note that the wood can be drilled before or after painting.

We drilled the 8-foot pieces like this.

Generally, the uprights will go on 8-inch centers. The end holes are exceptions; their centers are 3/4-inch in from each end.

The 1x2 wood is painted. This is the wrong way to do it.

The intent here is to seal the wood, so that the later paint will go on easily and stick. Here, we tried a couple of coats of cheap white spray paint. The unpainted wood soaked it up like a sponge, leaving no trace.

We got much better result - for less money - by using Kilz, from a can, applied with a brush. If we had been thinking a bit clearer, we would have tinted the Kilz gray.

We decided to top each vertical piece of PVC pipe with a skull "finial". These are made from plastic whistles, obtained by the gross from Toyguy.

The cheap plastic whistles have a prominent ridge of flashing across the middle, where we assume the mold came together. In some cases, it was terribly obvious and in others not much of a problem. We decided to minimize the problem by scraping the skulls with a razor knife.

This whistle was given a quick shot of paint before scraping to highlight the flashing that we are cleaning off.

This is also a good time to examine each whistle and reject the ones that have thin spots. Throws those into the pile of cheap toys to give to the trick-or-treaters; they still make great whistles.

Here are half-a-dozen skulls, glued and ready.

The whistle end of the skulls are slathered with hot-melt glue and shoved into the end of the PVC tubing.

There aren't many kinds of glue that will stick well to the plastic whistles. The hot-melt seems to work well if you use plenty of it. Avoid: super glue, white glue, epoxy.

Pipe sections inserted into the 1x2.

We hold the fence together with screws everywhere a pipe goes through wood (except the end holes).

Drill a pilot hole for the screw.

We set the length of the drill bit carefully; ran the drill all the way into the wood; and then pushed on it for a second. Thus used the chuck as a kind of countersink.

Screw.

Painting assembled section...

We used a base coat of incredibly cheap gray acrylic spray paint to get close to the color we wanted. Unfortunately, the cheap gray spray leaves a glossy finish. Our topcoat is a nice flat-finish gray primer.

Some folks paint their PVC fences black. We reserve black for things we want to vanish into the night. The gray looks vaguely metallic - perhaps made from lead.

You can count on some of the paint flaking off the skull whistle finials. Nothing sticks well to that kind of plastic. We tried the old trick of first applying spray-on adhesive, with paint on top, but it gave our test skull a bubbly look. Your best bet is to just keep a can of paint around and touch up as necessary.

Dead cans - enough paint to get through about half the 9 sections of fencing.

We warned you it would take a lot of paint!

Dead bottles - enough sugar and caffeine to get us through about half the 9 sections.

Completed sections.

Completed sections - close up.

You want the end holes a little looser than the ones in the middle, so you can easily slide a piece of pipe in to hold sections together. After building a lot of these fence sections, we realized that a slightly larger drill bit would have worked well for the ends.

For the sections that were drilled with small holes throughout, David opens up the end holes with a sanding drum.

Setup is easy.

Each 8-foot section uses four stakes. The two in the middle are short (18") stakes. The stakes at the ends are long (36") stakes, and are shared with the next section.

• http://www.anaserve.com/~BoBandrews/fence.htm
• http://halloween.uber-geek.org/
• http://www.citilink.com/~blorsung/halloween/Projects/fence.html
• http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/smessin983/Halloween/Fence.html
• http://www.zbd.com/halloween/fence.html

Note that many of these projects call for a short fence - 3 1/3 feet tall. We decided on 5 feet tall.

• fence columns

Please see our other pages on PVC fences:

• basic construction [this page]
• 2001 fence update

Thank you for visiting. Your comments are welcome.
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