Leaping Arches

If you’ve watched enough videos you have no doubt seen a Leaping Arch. They are the lights that chase each other over an arc like a fish jumping. A very cool effect, and one I thought would be time consuming and more advanced for later. After watching Jeremy’s CrazyChristmasCrew video blog I decided I’d give it a whirl.

Making an arch involves endless wrapping of about 800 lights around a PVC pipe. Fun right? Most videos I’d seen involved wrapping the wires around a single, very long, piece of pipe. 

Ugh. 

Jeremy’s solution is much better. Wrap one strand around ~12” of ¾” pipe, do that eight times, then slide those pipes onto a smaller ½” pipe. Presto! Leaping Arch. Or in my case, chasing eve.

The multi-pipe solution is better in several ways. You can swap out a dead section easily, storage is easier, and you can re-use sections in different ways if you want. It’s also easier to wrap one strand at a time than to invent ways to spin a 10 foot pipe.

Cost: <$50 complete, if you use $3 incandescents instead of LEDs. So much for low power...

Time: from decision to completion was about six hours, including the trip to the hardware store and many TV breaks while I wrapped on my couch. It is still somewhat tedious, but you should only have to do it once, and the effect is very cool. Conveniently it turns out that a 10 foot pipe will fit inside most small cars diagonally.

Materials (all findable in 10 minutes at Lowes or Home Depot):

• 10’ of ¾” PVC (they only come in this length at Lowes)
• 10’ of ½” PVC (make sure the ¾” can slide over the ½” inch)
• 8 strands of 100 lights. I used multi-color, your choice though.
  I used 22 foot strands (2.7” spacing) which wraps ~10 feet of pipe perfectly.
• 8” zip ties
• 2 nuts and bolts to keep the pipes from sliding off (anything will work here, cotter pins, nails, bolts are easiest) I used 10-24 2” bolts with locking nuts.
• I got three screw hooks to attach it to my eves too.

Did I say I would get that SPT extension cord next year? I lied. Right now I have my one non-leaping pipe hooked up to one channel since I don’t have enough cords. It will be at least 300’ of extension cord to wire this baby up. That will soon be remedied...