Last month I made blowguns and paper darts with my nephews, Luca (8) and Renzo (7) in Hoofddorp, the Netherlands. We had good fun, and afterwards I made a short how-to video showing the process. The video is in Dutch but includes English subtitles.
Materials
- PVC electrical conduit — about 1 m per blowgun; use 5/8 inch (≈ 1.6 cm) diameter. It’s cheap at most hardware stores (2 m is roughly €0.35).
- Hacksaw, sandpaper and a tape measure — for cutting and deburring the tube to length.
- Paper magazine and scissors — to make the paper darts.
Paper darts
Rolling the darts turned out to be a bit too fiddly for the kids, so plan to pre-make a bunch if you’re working with children of this age.
You can experiment with different papers and strip sizes — some papers produce noticeably stronger darts than others. A useful starting size is a strip roughly 8 x 30 cm, rolled tightly and sealed with saliva. The paper darts keep their shape for many weeks, which is impressive considering the only “glue” is a bit of spit.
When I was a kid, I also sometimes used common snowberries (Dutch: sneeuwbessen) as ammunition – they work well but are seasonal (autumn).
Blowgun
Kids can personalise their blowguns with colourful electrical tape and extra sections of tubing to build visors, dart holders, or simple decorations. It’s a small extra activity that makes each blowgun feel like the child’s own project.
And make sure they don’t shoot in each other’s eyes!
Target
Using a soft target preserves the tips of the paper darts so they can be reused a few times. An old net curtain with an archery-target face pinned on works well. If you blow hard, darts can travel far: in my tests they penetrated the target at distances up to around 18 m.
Links
Some extra (dated) info I found on blowguns and paper darts: The Paper Dart Site