Final Assignment: PVC Pipe Bird Sculpture

Have you ever made a type of large bird using a PVC pipe? Well, this is my first time making something out of a PVC pipe.

Before we decided the final chosen type of bird we are making on, we each drew sketches at different views of three types of bird of our choice. For me, I drew a emperor penguin, giant blue heron and emperor penguin. Each bird sketches, I drew at least 3 different views.

 

After sketching, I moved on to draw the three birds in a 3D view in a PVC pipe to see the appearance.

From looking at all our group members’ sketches, we decided to do the giant blue heron. We each drew a 2D view (when the PVC pipe is cut and open out into a rectangle) and 3D view (the pipe cylinder shape itself) . We even include the actual measurements of the bird.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Later on, we drew the life size template of the giant blue heron onto a piece of mahjong paper. By doing so makes it easier to trace it on the PVC pipe rather than drawing it from scratch on the pipe. At the same time, we made a small model to see how the bird sculpture will look like and get a rough idea.

After all the template and small model is completed, we start transferring the template onto the pipe. Meanwhile, we start our making process in the carpentry workshop.

Firstly, we traced the life sized drawing onto the PVC pipe using marker pens. We even use masking tape as a guideline for the tracing.

Later on, we took out the life sized drawing from the PVC pipe and started to cut out the base first using a jigsaw followed by the removed area that we indicated on the pipe with a jigsaw and rotary cutter. After removing the unwanted parts, we used a large and small file to smooth the rough edges and areas of the pipe.

These are the manufacturing tools  we used:

 

After finishing the bird pipe sculpture, we used different colours of spray paint to enhance the apperance and imitate the giant blue heron.

Here are the spray paints we used:

 

Final Outcome