Let’s bust out the tools and DIY some arches! Arches look great in your yard, especially filled with pixels, and they’re an awesome way to block areas off and keep people off your yard. You can also watch How to Build Boscoyo Medium Arches from PEX on our Youtube channel. 

Boscoyo arches are a product made out of thin, five-millimeter coro, which means it’s cheap. All together, these arches are a pretty reasonable cost to build. Boscoyo has instructions on their site that involves bending PVC pipe, but now that PEX piping is much more widely available, it makes a lot more sense. It comes in a curve already, it bends easily, but still has the rigidity to hold the coro. It was this thought that took me down the rabbit hole and after a lot of research, I combined some posts from other places, tweaked them, and added my own ideas to come up with this method. 

Parts and Tools Needed

1 x Boscoyo Medium Arches (Comes in two pieces)

1 x ½ inch x 47 inch PVC pipe

2 x PVC T-Joints

1 x ¾ by 73 inch PEX

4 x 1 ¼ or 1 ½ inch screws (Self Tapping screws)

2 x 18 inch rebar (to place in your yard)

Zip Ties 

Tools you will need:

Heat gun

Power drill

Jigsaw, hacksaw, etc

Cutters for zip ties

In terms of cutting PVC and PEX for this project, I use a jigsaw with a metal blade. Any hacksaw, jigsaw, etc is going to cut PEX and PVC. I think fine tooth blades work better, they cut through with ease, so that's my recommendation. Use whatever you want (but don't sit there with an X-Acto knife trying to cut this stuff, that's probably a bad idea!).

How to Assemble PEX and PVC

You’ll need a heat gun for the first step because PEX does not quite fit into PVC. This is ¾” PEX and ½” PVC. Why? Because pipes are measured by the inside and PEX is thinner than PVC, so they don’t quite fit together, but they’re really close.

 So we use the heat gun to heat the end of the PEX for a few seconds, until you can twist it into the PVC T-joint. Once you start to get it in there, you can twist back and forth to get it all the way on there. When you look down into the fitting (through the T-joint), you really want to see the PEX pushed in as far as possible. Ultimately you’re going to secure it all with the self-tapping screws.

Now it’s time to insert that 47” piece of PVC, making sure these T-joints are lined up correctly. The open end of the PVC joint is going to face down, because the best way to put these in your yard is with 18” pieces of rebar. I bought some on Amazon that were pre-cut because, let's face it, I don't feel like cutting a bunch of metal! If you do, feel free to do that because it'll be cheaper! After connecting your PVC pieces you should have an arch shape.

Secure with Screws

Let’s attach these together with those self-tapping screws. I saw all sorts of methods for this, some people use zip ties, but I think this is super simple and very secure. Place your first screw into the T to join the two PVC pieces, and the second screw to secure the PVC T-joint to the PEX inside it (see photo below). Be aware that if you didn’t insert the PEX really well, you might have to position your second screw closer to the top of the T.

Pro tip: I like these galvanized self-tapping screws for sheet metal because when you start really putting the pressure on the drill, those threads grab and it goes through quickly. If you’re using 1 ½” screws, they will poke through a bit, so you can hang the end off your table to put the screws in.

Zip-Tie Coro to PEX Arch

Next we’ll zip tie the Boscoyo coro to the PEX. After doing 16 of these, here’s my tips for what worked best! Place the two coro pieces on the table first and lay the arch on top of them (arch side closest to you). The difficult part here is that the PEX doesn’t have quite the same “arch” or curve as the coro. I found the best method is to line up the center first. Once you've done that, look at the two ends and you want those two ends on the ground side to be at the same level approximately. We're going to zip tie from the center out attaching the coro to the PEX.

Pro tip: If you have screw tips poking out, make sure the side of your arch with the pointy ends sticking out is facing up (this will be the back side of the arch). This way, when you’re done attaching the coro, those pointy ends will face away from your guests.

Start in the center zip-tying the coro pieces to the PEX, keeping the zippy part on the back side. If you do the two center holes first and get it all lined up right, it’ll make things easier as you go. Use the cutters to snip all the ends when you’re done.

Pro tip: Don’t go super tight when you first put the zip ties on, give yourself a little bit of room to work and make adjustments. Once you’re sure the ends are matching up, you can tighten those down.

 It should line up really nice in the center, the two ends should be pretty close. It doesn’t have to be perfect, most yards aren’t totally level anyway and you’ll be putting flashy lights in.

Adding Pixels and Final Tips

Now it’s ready to add pixels (like these NBG pixels). These arches are 32 pixels each. I created double arches for my yard, by zip-tying two of them together at the edges, so I have 64 pixels total. I put a new xConnect plug on the end and then I have two arches that can fold together with pixels in them, and fold away nice for storage. Maybe put a bungee ball on the other side.

When it’s time to set up, just stake in the rebar pieces, pop on the arch, and done!

I hope you enjoyed my method for making these Boscoyo medium arches. Ultimately there's a lot of ways to build these but I think that with the modern tools and materials that we have today, like PEX, this process can be made a lot easier.