8 things you can do with pvc cement

1. Turn a plastic bag into a toilet seat cover

2. Make a planter for your windowsill

3. Create a no-sew cushion for your sofa

4. Make PVC pipe handles out of old bags

5. Create a mold for t-shirts, snowboards, and more

6. Create a mold for candles

PVC cement is a natural product; it’s made by bacteria in the soil. It helps plants grow better, and it is stronger than concrete. I’d say it’s an obvious thing to use at home. But some people on the internet have not heard of this material.

People are scared to use PVC cement because they are afraid they will fire up their neighbors’ houses, or that their neighbors will fire up their houses.

Those are not problems with using pvc cement. They are problems with making a mistake when choosing what to do with PVC cement. If you want to use this material where your neighbors can see, you’d better use something else for that purpose, like paint or wallpaper. And if you want something strong, like a fence or wall that can last for years, you’d better use something else but also strong: steel or concrete.

The real problem with using PVC cement is that there are good reasons why people avoid using it even when they know they should. When I asked whether people had ever used pvc cement around their house, the answer was No…even though I am sure some had used it around their house at one time or another. People said they had used this stuff at work, but that didn’t count because “it

PVC cement is a kind of plastic – polyvinyl chloride to be precise – produced primarily from oil. Today we use it in plumbing, but it was first used as a glue and then as a pipe coating. It’s known as “PVC” because it looks like this:

It’s not hard to make your own, by mixing and heating up PVC paint. But the right kind of PVC doesn’t need to be mixed; it needs only to be heated. That’s why you can do all kinds of things with PVC cement, like:

Rearrange a box

Make a picture frame out of an old poster

Make a gift box or container that won’t break when you try to open it

Use in your garden for paths and borders

Use in the fish tank for decoration and to stop algae growing on glass surfaces

Make a model boat or plane or boat trailer out of wood or styrofoam

Use as scratch foam for creative building

All the best-known building materials have a long history. Stone is as old as human civilization. Wood has been used for building since prehistory. But one material that has become very important recently is plastic: the polymer polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, which was invented by Wallace Carothers in 1935.

PVC cement is easy to use. You mix up some powder with water, and it hardens into a strong, flexible glue that sticks your home together just like ordinary cement would. It comes in different varieties – the kind you can buy at the hardware store is conforming epoxy, but there are also rigid PVC cements for exterior use and so on.

Because of its flexibility, you can use it for many different kinds of jobs. Its strongest point is that it is cheap and easy to work with: you don’t need any special equipment to mix or apply it, and you can do almost anything with it (as long as you don’t mind ruining other materials used in the project). It isn’t toxic or flammable – it’s not even caustic, which is the case with ordinary cement – and so can be used on all kinds of surfaces (although it doesn’t stick well to metals). So if you want your house

PVC cement doesn’t “fix” anything. It just holds things in place until you can replace them with something else. PVC cement is a by-product of plastic manufacturing, and it’s cheap. I buy it from a place called Lowes (www.lowes.com), the building supply store. You can also find it at Home Depot, but I find Home Depot to be more expensive than Lowes.

PVC cement is a form of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC for short. Plastics are made from long chains of carbon atoms bonded together in all sorts of chemical bonds, such as covalent and ionic bonds, sometimes called “hard” bonds and sometimes called “soft.” Most plastics are made by putting these chains together in an orderly way and adding reinforcement. If a chain is too short or too weak, it breaks; if it’s too long or too strong, the molecules clump up into large chunks that don’t flow well when molten plastic cools down.

PVC has been around for over 100 years because its long chains are very strong. Pipes made out of PVC are used everywhere: faucets, pipes for water and gas lines, plumbing for holding wires and cables. Plastic shopping bags (the ones with

PVC cement is a good example of how to make money from what looks like a dead end. There is a lot of it, and not much of it. PVC cement comes in two types. Low-density polyethylene (LDPE) is the one you buy in the supermarket. It is used for packaging. High-density polyethylene (HDPE) is made for industrial applications and isn’t sold for consumer use. If you want to make your own PVC cement, you have to mix LDPE with HDPE; this means you are buying an already mixed product and paying through the nose for it.

But there is no reason why one type of cement can’t be mixed with the other, especially if it was mixed before. And that’s what happened in the early days of plastics: before World War II, manufacturers were free to mix LDPE with HDPE and then sell both as “plastic” because they were two different products. There are even patents showing how they did it.

And so there are people making PVC cement today who mix LDPE with HDPE and sell it as a new product under the name “new plastic.” Same stuff but cheaper!

PVC plastic is durable but not indestructible. For example, it’s not as strong as steel. So you can’t stick it up against a wall, and you can’t use it to build a big brick house. But you can use it to build a house of a different kind: one that is really strong but light.

The trick is to make it out of materials that are light but really strong, like glass or carbon fiber. You do this by sandwiching the material between two layers of relatively weak stuff. In this case, the weak stuff is called a material called polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and the middle layer is called a hardener. The final product looks like this:

The soft PVC and the hardener are both liquids. You mix them together in a bucket, first with one part of soft PVC to four parts hardener, and then with two parts soft PVC to three parts hardener, until you get the strength you want. Once you’ve found that strength, you can add more PVC and more hardener until your strength requirement is met:

It’s an interesting demonstration of how much stronger something can be if you don’t mind having a few weaknesses at first.