Oops, bought too much!

[+Blue_Ranger]

So I built a storage rack for my kayaks out of PVC pipe. Thing is, I bought more than I needed, and I now have more than 30 feet of 2" pipe left over. Now I'm looking for ideas on how to make a cache involving a whole lot of 2" pipe! An epic fill-it-with-water has come to mind, but water is really heavy to carry-- I wouldn't want to make anyone carry a ridiculous amount. So... what would you make?

[+kunarion]

There are a couple of things I'd like to do. There are still engineering and design hurdles, and I haven't made any of these. But one idea is to secure the pipe vertically to a wall or building so that it looks just like an ordinary drain pipe, and make it so that lifting it reveals a small container inside.

 

Or shove the pipe along the ground into a tangled mass of thorn bushes, and have a rod or other device to retrieve the container.

 

Another thing that might be cool is to have cachers find specially designed sections of the pipes and fit them together to make a long retrieval tool, where the cache is up in a tree or whatever. Maybe the pipe sections could be a giant puzzle.

Edited September 19, 2016 by kunarion

[+cerberus1]

I'd go online for ideas on pvc outdoor projects, and forget the idea of sticking pipes in the ground (all the "fill-it-with-water" caches we've found years ago) - that digging rule thing.

Even the Cherne test plug glued-on-one-end "pipe caches" didn't fare well in our testing (damp to soaked contents), and our experience with one end threaded was worse.

YMMV...

[+fizzymagic]

There's a cache near us where you hit a foot pump on one end of a long section of (hidden) PVC pipe and a Bison pops out of the other.

[+T.D.M.22]

Get a bison tube and attach a fishing bobber to it. Taken your PVC and put a cap on the bottom. Still a bunch of holes near the bottom of the PVC. The finder has to fill it with water to make the bison tube float up, and access the logbook.

 

Use good bison tube, and rite in the rain paper.

 

Edit: I see someone already posted this idea.

 

My cache was also attached to a powerpole. A fence post would aalso work. No digging required.

Edited September 19, 2016 by T.D.M.22

[+Touchstone]

Not a cache idea, but a fun trade item:

 

[+Optimist on the run]

There's a cache near us where you hit a foot pump on one end of a long section of (hidden) PVC pipe and a Bison pops out of the other.

 

I tried making something like that recently - the pump was broken within a couple of weeks of publication

[+Optimist on the run]

So I built a storage rack for my kayaks out of PVC pipe. Thing is, I bought more than I needed, and I now have more than 30 feet of 2" pipe left over. Now I'm looking for ideas on how to make a cache involving a whole lot of 2" pipe! An epic fill-it-with-water has come to mind, but water is really heavy to carry-- I wouldn't want to make anyone carry a ridiculous amount. So... what would you make?

 

A 30' trackable?

[+J Grouchy]

It'd be cool if you could devise some sort of Strongman Game using air pressure in a PVC pipe.

It would probably be a technical and maintenance nightmare, but it would be cool if you could make it work.

[+hzoi]

One of the lab caches at the GCHR mega event earlier this month was a tangle of PVC pipes. You had to tilt this way and that to get the object with the code word out. Might be doable as an actual cache where you have to finagle the log out.

[+niraD]

I've seen caches that used a section of PVC pipe, where you needed a magnet to retrieve the cache. Or where there was a rare-earth magnet attached to the cache, and you needed something magnetic to retrieve the cache.

[+Manville Possum]

There's a cache near us where you hit a foot pump on one end of a long section of (hidden) PVC pipe and a Bison pops out of the other.

 

I tried making something like that recently - the pump was broken within a couple of weeks of publication

 

I saw a similar cache in WV, it took three people to "blow" the cache out. It did not last the weekend before someone broke it.

[+edscott]

So I built a storage rack for my kayaks out of PVC pipe. Thing is, I bought more than I needed, and I now have more than 30 feet of 2" pipe left over. Now I'm looking for ideas on how to make a cache involving a whole lot of 2" pipe! An epic fill-it-with-water has come to mind, but water is really heavy to carry-- I wouldn't want to make anyone carry a ridiculous amount. So... what would you make?

 

I've seen one listed as a two stage puzzle with some gallon jugs available at stage 1. The route to stage two takes the searchers past a dependable water source. The puzzle is to realize you'll need the jugs of water at the final. I had to walk back for them.

[+niraD]

I've also seen multi-stage puzzles that required you to assemble PVC pieces correctly, so that the assembled PVC pieces would direct you to the next stage. (The result was a "pointer" of sorts, rather than a set of coordinates.)

[+hzoi]

There was a multi stage I saw recently that had a number of pipe sections, as well as a rack with some posts. On one side of the pipe sections, there were letters for different words that had to be spelled out; on the other, numbers. When the words were properly stacked, the other side showed coordinates to the next stage.

[+fizzymagic]

I also found a cache once in which the cache itself (a nano) was inside a PVC puzzle maze. You had to turn the PVC maze in a series of correct directions in order to extract the cache. I liked it.

[+msrubble]

If you had some elbow joints, you could make a complicated-looking contraption where the finder had to drop a golf ball in one end to get the cache container to shoot out another opening. If you did this, though, you'd probably also have to provide instructions on how to get the container back in its "impossible" spot. Maybe a capped pipe on a T-joint.

[+Blue_Ranger]

Inspiration came to me while I was at work today. I think it will involve elements of several suggestions here and on an FB post, along with something that will be familiar if you've found some WVTim caches. No water though-- fall is beginning already, and I'm in the Buffalo area, don't want the whole thing to ice up shortly after it gets placed!