100lb Medieval Style PVC Crossbow for Under $10 Part 2 - Building the Trigger and Attachments

To build all of our extra pieces like the bolt clip, the safety, the trigger, and the stirrup, you're going to need a half an inch pipe. Now I suggest you use something like this, which is gray conduit, because it has the UV resistance built in. You don't have to worry about painting it. You don't have to worry about it getting brittle over time or anything. Plus it's nice. This is going to get scratched. A lot of these parts are going to get kind of scuffed up if you use this a lot. And so, you know, there's no paint to scratch through, no finish to mess up. It'll always look good. And if it starts to look a little ragged, you can just sand it a little bit and it'll look just like new. Now you'd want to use the conduit if you want to keep the price of this bow down, say around or under $10. But for me, I wanted to do something a little different for this particular build. So I'm using half an inch furniture grade PVC. It's nice because it also has UV resistance built in. But the color choices are a lot more varied. And I like this, the idea of having a crossbow with all red parts. So this is what I'm going to start with. What you're going to need to do is cut your pipe into four pieces. The first piece is going to be 14 inches long. And this is going to become the main trigger lever. You're going to need two pieces that are six inches long. One is going to become the safety and the other one is going to become the bolt retainer or the bolt clip. And then your final piece is going to be 23 inches long. And this is going to become the stirrup. To make the trigger lever, you're going to need to flatten the pipe completely. So before I do anything else, I'm going to go ahead and heat up the pipe and flatten it in my flattening jig until it's completely flat. I'm also going to do the same thing to all my other pieces because all the pieces need to be flat. Now that the trigger lever is flattened, you're going to mark one inch from the end and then four inches from that. So one inch from the end and five inches from the end. These two marks should be centered because we're going to use a one-eighth inch drill bit. We're going to drill a hole here and here. This way we can attach it to the tiller. Now that the holes are drilled, you want to go on to the other side and you want to heat up about the last two inches of this lever. Just heat it up gently and then once it's soft enough to bend, we're just going to bend it upward a little bit. Just so that when you grip the trigger, you have something to hold on to and you're not just pulling up on the straight bar. That's about good. We don't want to heat this up until it puffs out. So now you just want to bend it out a little bit. Not too much. Make sure it's somewhat lined up with everything else. Alignment is not really important with this. There it is. So that way when the trigger comes down, it's a little easier to lift up. So here it is. Now I'm just going to go ahead and round this side off and then I'm going to grind this to a point. I'll show you what that looks like. Really you can do whatever you want here. You could leave it square if you want. These parts, this end and this end, it's just for looks. Now that your trigger lever is done, we're going to attach it to the stock. Measure seven inches from the front end of the stock and that's where we're going to align our trigger bar. We want this to start seven inches from the end. To attach it, I'm using two inch phillip head screws. You can use whatever you want, but I like these because I can put them in, I can take them out, move them around if I want. And it means that I can take everything off of this and move things around, switch things out if I wanted to. So it really makes things easy that way. But you can use whatever fasteners you want. So I'm going to go ahead and screw these in. I'll show you what it looks like. Now that the trigger lever is attached, we're going to work on our pin. I'm using a half an inch dowel. This usually works really well. Now if it doesn't fit, you may have to sand the dowel until it fits. You want it to fit fairly loosely. You see it moves in easily. It moves around fairly easily because you don't want this to get stuck. You want there to be some movement. And it's okay if it's a little on the side because when we put the bolt retainer up here, it will keep this from coming out. So you don't have to worry about that. Now you just want to place it until it contacts the lever. And then just go ahead and mark it right at that level. You want to mark this flush with the rest of the stock. So now that we've got this, you want to cut that off and then round this edge a little bit. I'm also going to finish it with the shoe polish and a little bit of shellac. And I'll show you what that looks like. Here's the finished pin. Take it and drop it in. Now it's ready to go. Now we're going to work on the safety. Now that we have the pin as a reference, we can figure out how high we need to have the trigger be when the safety is engaged. For this next part, you need one of your six inch pieces that's been flattened. Pick a side and just heat it up gently. Then we're going to bend it at a 90 degree angle. That way we can create just a little bit of a ledge or a little bit of a hook. Then we'll be able to file that down to fine tune it so that it sits with the trigger perfectly. Here we go. All right, so now you take this and you just bend it up at a 90 degree angle. You want this to be around a quarter to a half an inch tall. We'll be grinding off a little bit of this. So I've gone ahead and ground it flat and also rounded off the corners. So now what I'm going to do is take it along the bottom of the crossbow and just push it up right until the front of the the trigger pin. Push the pin all the way down. You can see it's kind of far. I've already gone too far and that's good. That means we can adjust this back. So now you just pull back on the safety. You can see the pin is starting to come up and you just want it to go just to where the pin is just a little bit above the bottom of that V. That's about as far as the string will push it. You want it so that when the crossbow is spanned and the string is here that there's not a lot of tension. There's a little bit of tension on the safety from the handle lever but not a lot so that you can remove the safety without it making a lot of noise or being extremely difficult. As you can see right now it's fairly tight. So now that you've done that you want to take a pen and mark right behind the handle about a quarter of an inch behind the end of this handle here. You just want to put a little X there and that's where we're going to drill our hole. Then you want to trim the handle about a half an inch to three quarter inches behind that. That way when this comes down it will not impede. This end will not impede with the trigger lever. If you left this too long it could cause this to not go down all the way so you wouldn't be able to use your trigger. I'm going to go ahead and cut round and drill this hole and I'll show you what that looks like. Gone ahead drilled my hole and trimmed the back. Now to place this you just do the same thing we did earlier. Push the safety all the way up the lever until the pin comes down and then just pull it back until the pin is right where you want it to be. So now you take that, line it up and then just drill right there. I'm going to do that and I'll show you what that looks like. Here's the finished safety. To use it you just swing this bar around, lift up the handle and there you go. When you want to use it you just flick this out to the side and there it is. To make the bolt clip start off with the other six inch piece of pvc. I've gone ahead and flattened it. I've also made two lines here. What you want to do is have the center section be half an inch wide. We're going to cut these two side pieces off so we have one piece of half an inch wide pvc to work with. So I'm going to go ahead and cut this out and I'll show you what it looks like. All right I've gone ahead and cut out my piece. I went ahead and sanded it smooth on all sides and I also rounded the front and back. Now what you want to do is mark the center because we're only going to be heating up half of this. So to do that just take your heat gun and we're going to make one bend and a nice curve. So first we're going to make a bend. So we're going to heat up right at that center point. Okay so you see how it's starting to curl up. The side that's curling in used to be the inside and that's going to become the top now. What you want to do is just bend this at a fairly hard angle. You can do 90 or you can do a little less than 90. Now once that's cooling you want to heat up the end here and you just want to pull it upward while it's cooling. So now that you have this, heat up this middle portion and we're going to bend it back down. So here we go. So now you just want to bend it and then you want to bend it just a little bit lower than the... there we go. So you want to bend this so that it ends up being just a little bit lower than the height of this here. That way when we put this flat against the crossbow there'll be some spring tension here right off the bat. So now that this is cooled, mark about three-eighths of an inch from the end here and this is where we're going to drill a hole so that we can screw this onto the crossbow. I've gone ahead and drilled the hole. So now you want to take it and line it up on the crossbow so that this clip is situated right above the pin and this bend is right where this notch begins. The way this works is when the string comes back it will slide under this front of the clip and then it'll slide under here. Now this clip will also keep the pin in place because if this wasn't here the pin could just fall out. This also makes it easy to take the pin out if you need to change it or make any adjustments later. This is also going to create a little bit of a stop so that when you put a bolt in here it'll come up and it'll hit the back end here and it won't go all the way behind the string. That'll help prevent misfires. So you just want to line it up, figure out where the center is, and then you just want to take a screw and screw it in place. I'm going to do that and I'll show you what that looks like. Here's the finished bolt clip. To use it you just take your bolt, put it in, and then you can see it helps stop it so that it doesn't go behind the string. It also holds it in place so you can move it around forward, back, side to side, and if you don't want it here you just move this out of the way. Here it is. Now we're going to work on the stirrup. Here I have my piece of pipe that I flattened. This is the 23 inch piece. You want to make some additional markings here. You want to make two markings four inches in from the end then three inches in from those four inch marks, so three inches away, and then two inches away, and that will leave you with a five inch center section. Now you just want to take this and heat it up and we're just going to heat it and bend it into the stirrup shape. Here we go. So you want to fold it not quite 90 degrees, just a little bit out from there. You just want to let it cool. Once it's cool we're going to heat the other side. All right, you want to heat up the other side. All right, once the other side's been heated you want to just make sure that the angles are pretty consistent. This way the stirrup will be nice and aligned when you put it on your bow. Now it doesn't have to be perfect or exact unless you want it to look perfect because even if it's a little off it'll still work fine. So now that this is cool I'm going to go ahead and heat up one side. I'm going to work on one side at a time. So first I'm going to heat up at this two inch mark. Now I want to bend this over so that this three inch mark sits about at the center of this five inch mark. You can see that and this is going to be the shape of our stirrup. So once this cools we're going to heat this side up or we're going to heat this, bring it back, then we're going to heat this side and then heat this side and bring it all together. Now I'm going to heat up this portion. Now you want to heat this and form it back. This is going to become our stirrup. Once this cools we want to heat up this section right here. So now you want to bend this back. You want to match this angle with the with this piece here. Just kind of match them up so that they're in about the same direction and let it cool like that. Now go ahead and heat at the two inch mark. Now you take this and you bring it in. Just kind of push inward and there it is. So now there's just a little bit of adjustment that needs to be done down here. Just make sure that this top portion is lined up because everything else can be adjusted in the next step where we actually get this ready to be fit to the crossbow. Now that this is cool we're going to heat up all the way around here until it's soft enough where we can actually take it and twist it so that this will be able to attach to the bottom of our crossbow. What you want to do is grab both ends together, make sure they're nice and even, and then you just want to go ahead and twist. It doesn't really matter what direction you twist because you know this will all work out. Just kind of over twist a little bit and let it cool. There it is. So you want to go on here and mark from two inches from this end and three quarter inch from this end. This is where you're going to drill your two holes. Now when you're drilling the holes you want to make sure that this is pulled together as much as you can. Pull them together as close together as possible so that when you drill your hole it keeps these two together. We've gone ahead and drilled the holes. Now what you want to do is line it up with the end of the crossbow just until this first twist clears the end. You want it to sit nicely against the bottom of the crossbow. Then you just take your screw, line up the holes, and attach this. So I'm going to go ahead and attach this and I'll show you what it looks like. All right now that I've attached it you can see it's not perfectly aligned yet. I'm just going to go ahead and heat this up so that I can line it up. Now alternatively you could just attach the stirrup on before twisting this and then just heat it up and twist it on the crossbow. But I find it a little less cumbersome to do that beforehand. But that's another way of doing it as well. So here we go. So you just want to twist it from side to side. Just adjust it so that it sits evenly with the rest of the stock. Let's rest flat. There it is. Now the stock or tiller of the crossbow is all finished. The only thing we have to do now is build and attach our prod. Here we go.