 We're here at Quads and Coffee in Orlando in November. I built a whole bunch of really cool gates in the back and other obstacles so that the crowd can come and check out some of the little drones we've been building recently. I want to show you guys how you can make some of your own PVC pipe gates that are really affordable, a lot of fun and really easy to build. They're like Legos for big kids. You've got single gates, double gates, and of course the triple gate here. Well Shawn, make sure you're putting this stuff together. I know everyone here is having a great time with it. Let's go back to yesterday when you were building all this stuff so they can see what it takes to make these fun little race gates. If you've watched some of our previous videos, you may know that I love to build things. What you may not know is that I used to run a drone racing chapter for multi-GP named the Orlando Road Racers. We hosted some awesome events and over the years I built some amazing race courses. Today I'm going to show you how you can build some affordable practice gates that you can use to fly in your front yard, back yard, and maybe even indoors. If you're into FPV racing or even if you're just an FPV freestyle pilot and you just love to fly through obstacles, practice gates can be a great tool for that. Just a few gates can completely transform a space. I have four different classifications of gates depending on your budget, the size you need it to be, and how much complexity or effort you might want to put into building them. This is definitely the least expensive and easiest gate for you to build at home if you want to be able to fly inside your living room. And this is something you can buy at the dollar store for a dollar and you can build two gates out of each piece of foam board for less than a dollar per gate. You can even make little feet like I did here to where you can prop it up on your kitchen table or you can actually hang it from the ceiling with thumbtacks and string with these little holes I put at the top. I'll have links to the plans for this in the description. You guys can check it out if you guys want to cut out this shape yourself or pretty much any shape you want to make out of foam board. The next class of gates is just a little bit more expensive but they're super easy to set up. They're a little bit larger in size. They're very durable for little drones and they're just so convenient. I just love coming home from work and throwing these out in the yard and getting a quick rip in before it gets dark. Race gates! But these are so awesome you can just kind of throw them anywhere you want. You can go online and get this pop-up soccer gate. Take it out of the bag. You're going to want to cut the netting out of the soccer gate and what you have left is the perfect drone racing gate. There you go. You can just kind of twist and fold it up and you see how fast it is to just take this gate and pack it away or throw it out and have a gate. Just buy these gates, cut the netting out, throw them in your front yard and you've got a race course set up right away. We'll put a link in the description where you can get some of these on Amazon. It might change over time because things are always coming on and off Amazon but we'll give you a link to these so you can buy them if you want. This is a four foot pop-up gate. You can get them in a six foot pop-up gate and we've got some of those up here. We've got these orange ones right here. These are a lot bigger for five inch drones, for example. With five inch drones you just got to be a little more cautious because this is not really thick. If you hit them too hard they will break but they do last a really long time. The next class of gates I would consider the most fun. I really enjoy making gates out of PVC pipe because it's like Legos for big kids. You can get most of the stuff at your local hardware like Lowe's or Home Depot and you just buy a couple of different pieces, get yourself some PVC, cut it into sections and you can put it together in crazy amazing shapes, all kinds of different shapes. You can make dive gates, ladders, flags. You can do anything you want with PVC. It's super easy to work with. Pretty much the shapes are unlimited. Because they're hollow and they're white you can actually run an LED strip right through the center of them and it lights up like a candle. It's amazing. It's so cool for night courses. I love these little RGB controllers because you can literally just plug them in, hook it to your phone and pick a color. Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew. And that's been a lesson on how to build your own Star Wars lightsaber. Use this tool from Home Depot and in the parking lot you can literally cut this PVC down to a size that will fit inside your little grocery or car if you don't have a big old pickup truck to carry a 10-foot piece of PVC with you. Fiberglass rebar. You can cut it with a hacksaw. It's a lot cheaper than the metal stuff. You can use either type of rebar to hammer these into the ground to anchor the race gates. If you need it to be more visible you can actually go to the dollar store and get some pool noodles for swimming and put the pool noodles over it and it'll make it a little more visible if you need it to be. The PVC gates will hold themselves together pretty well on their own. Without any type of glue or screws but if you want a more permanent setup you can use this heavy-duty PVC glue to glue the PVC together or if you want a less permanent setup that's still pretty sturdy, screws and screwing the screws into the PVC at the joints rather than using glue that way if I needed to I can always unscrew it and pull it back apart for maintenance. If these are a little bit too small and difficult for you to see flying your FPV drone you can add fabric to them. Multi-GP has been putting fabric around their gates for a long time. If you want to make official multi-GP size gates you're going to need two pieces of PVC that are six foot and one piece that's seven foot for the top. Two right angle pieces and that's all you need for multi-GP official size gates. PVC is probably my favorite material to make gates out of but if you want to make some really huge, really durable professional size gates metal EMT conduit is the way to go. This stuff is awesome it's extremely durable it's weather resistant and if you construct it right it's even wind resistant. We had some really awesome dive gates set up at Rotor Riot Rampage the last two years in a row where we did 100 gates and 101 gates the following year. Quadruple dive gates you can do some really cool stuff with EMT. This is three quarter inch PVC this is three quarter inch conduit it's the same size as the PVC just a lot stronger and this is what we use to make professional gates it's definitely a little bit more expensive than PVC and it's a little bit more difficult to transport. It's really durable, really strong just like PVC you can put it together with connecting pieces and make some really cool Lego objects for big kids. The first Lego obstacle I'm going to show you how to build is a ladder. These things will hold together really well if you hammer them in place and then whenever I'm trying to line it up I'll have it set on the floor like this and just line them up so that they're both going in the same direction this is going to be the top of the gate here and now I'm going to put the tees in there just to create a bridge in the middle just like this get the center section here okay partially there I'm going to put our bottom section on the ladder here this is called a ladder and we're going to do another tee because now we need to build our base alright so we're going to take this tee I'm going to put it in this direction again both sides put another joiner in there and now we've got two squares for this one we're actually going to need six tees we're going to have four joining the two squares and two on the bottom to create the legs and this is where you're going to want to use your small pieces we're going to go ahead and put our small sections right in here to allow us to connect another tee onto this tee and we're going to put these two tees in the opposite direction here facing that way and this will make our legs alright so we'll put this is one side of our leg we're going to flip it up and put the other side on always use gravity as your friend there we go and that's how you build a PVC ladder another obstacle you can build is a dive gate let's do that next I'll show you how to mount this to the wall with the tees as well alright we're going to feed this through woo look at that super bright for our wall mat we're going to use two tee sections two small pieces and cut these in half that's pretty good take our dive gate put this guy here put our tee here our other tee here these will be up against the wall when it's all said and done use gravity to help us basically like a mini ladder but we're going to end up drilling holes in these pieces here and then we can use that to screw them to the wall one more thing I want to do before I put this on the wall is I'm going to secure this with screws I want it to be more sturdy and secure so it doesn't fall apart when we hit it with drones by accident so we're going to go ahead and put some self-tapping screws into the plastic to lock the pieces together these self-tapping screws will go through the PVC plastic without cracking it and I'm just going to put one of these at each joint just to keep them from being able to separate from each other alright, there we go now it should be really strong and secure and not come apart of course I had to put this on this end rather than over here which would have been a lot smarter but for now I'm just going to zip tie this along the edge I think time to put it on the wall these are three inch drywall screws for any of you that's falling along that's in a stud that's a solid gate right there here we go moment of truth green dive gate there's a lot of ways to make practice gates there's a lot of other cool ideas and concepts on how to make practice gates if you have an idea that I didn't mention please let us know in the comments be sure to hit the subscribe button click the bell do the like thing and build some gates thanks for watching we'll see you guys next time on Rotoriot