by David W. Oaks

I have helped make about a dozen enormous hypodermic needles for skits and plays and guerilla theater.

Making enormous prop hypo’s actually goes back to the playwright Moliére.

The key ingredient in modern times, for us anyway, is:

One very long, thin, stiff piece of PVC tube!

You see, that’s the “skeleton” of the whole hypo, from top to bottom.

You can “slice” one tip at an angle, and glue on tin foil, and you have the point of your hypo.

Everything else, you “thread” the pvc tube.

What I found best is to use a bunch of round disks that I cut of various sizes. The best I found is corrugated plastic because it’s stiff and light-weight, but anything firm will do.

You cut holes in the very middle of these disks about the size of the PVC, so they can be threaded snugly.

Then thread your PVC tube through the disks.

Around a set of the disks of the identical “medium size,” you wrap white cardboard, and tape it all up with wide plastic clear tape. That becomes your “cylinder” and you can mark it with hash measuring marks to make that crystal clear.

Near the top end of the “cylinder” thread on an extra-big disk — that’s the part your first two fingers would grip to depress the plunger.

At at the very end, opposite the sharp end obviously, thread another semi-large disk which would be the part your enormous thumb would press! Tape securely with lots of wide clear plastic tape.

That’s the basics.

If you want to hoist well in the air, get some long PVC tubes and bungee cords.

You can use “Google images” to search for drawings and photos of hypo’s to inspire you.

One is displayed here.