Turn anywhere into a skate park! Here’s how to build a portable PVC rail.

We talked to East Van Skate Crows to hear about how their idea to help skaters build their own PVC rails came to be.

“East Van Skate Crows thrived over the summer with outdoor meetups and skating. We held our first free skate camp at Van Tech Highschool one evening in August. It was a group of about nine of us that had connected online. When summer ended, and numbers began to rise, we wanted to keep the community-building momentum going and released our first zine highlighting the folks we’d been skating with. We applied for the TD Park People grant through a recommendation from a friend who was involved. They were piloting a winter grant, and we were accepted.

We had a big list of ideas, but we felt that the PVC rail was ideal since access to parks isn’t ideal during our rainy months, and we wanted to promote that you can skate anywhere! PVC rails are ideal for making skate park practice portable. It’s a huge help with learning to balance, slide, jump, and stall. It transitions well to tricks that use coping, ledges, and rails with the benefit of being about to bring it inside your home or on grass (for a softer landing) without needed access to specific features. It meant a lot to us to bring this to people at no cost and help the community come together and learn in a time when being apart is more of a reality than ever.”

I took part in this skate camp and can confirm it was AWESOME.

I am not the handiest person, so I was worried about assembling the rail, but they made it super easy. I’ve been having a ton of fun practicing hopping on and off and slowly learning to slide along it. It’s a lot of fun and a good way to mix up practice when rollerskating in a small space. So, I thought I’d share how you can build your own. My sister was helping me build the rail.

Naturally, her inner engineer drew up this very helpful diagram to explain how all the pieces fit together.