Homemade Building Toys with PVC Pipes

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Building toys are some of my kids’ favorite kind of toys. It really gets their creative juices flowing when they are creating their own structures and inventions. You can make your own STEM building toys with PVC pipes and fittings.  You can use them to build so many different creations! These are perfect for an engineering project.

See them in action!

How to Make Building Toys with PVC Pipes

Supplies:

3/4″ PVC pipe
Pipe Elbow Pieces I have some 90 degree and some 45 degree elbows.
Pipe Tee Pieces
Spray Paint that works on Plastic (totally optional,  but makes it more fun!)
Pipe Cutting Tool (or a saw)

I spray painted the attachment fittings with a few different colors, to make the toys look more exciting, but that step is optional. I think I gave them three coats of paint. I let them dry 1 day between each coat.

Using the pipe cutter, I cut all of our pipe pieces at 6 inches. I am going to pick up some more pipe and do some 12 inch pieces, too.

I also plan to pick up some 4-way and 5-way pieces, but our hardware store did not have them in the size I needed when I purchased the supplies. This will allow the kids to make more things & bigger things!  They want to use them to build a fort.

These have been so much fun for my kids, particularly my middle son. He has an engineer mind and creates things all the time.  The kids have built tons of different things with these homemade PVC building toys. They have built towers and buildings, My son made a croquet set!

He even used them to build himself a little crutch when his foot got hurt one day. My favorite creation was his moving construction digger truck.

It is basically his own little homemade engineering set. Every day he thinks up some new ingenious idea to use these PVC pipe building toys.

Tons of fun, right?  There are so many possibilities.

Check out more of my STEM content here: Elementary STEM Projects for Kids