Home made Foam Roller

The foam roller is the perfect DIY project. Not only can you make it better than commercial options, you can make it for 1/3 of the price. It takes only 20 minutes, if that, and even a child possesses the necessary skills to complete it.
Cost: around $10 to $15
Project time: 20 minutes
 Difficulty: If you can't manage this, wait until you start Kindergarten where you'll learn the appropriate skills, such as how to cut tape.
Materials Needed:

• PVC pipe (roughly 2 foot length, 4 to 6 inch diameter)
• Duct Tape
• Pipe Insulation foam
• Lacrosse balls (tennis balls are a poor substitute, but a substitute nonetheless)

Tools Needed:
Scissors would help (or a knife)
Foam rollers are not cheap. Most of them wear down over time and lose their stiffness, making them less effective or even useless eventually. And as a bonus we'll get more than just a foam roller out of this project. If you want to spend $30 a piece on something that will eventually wear out, go for it. Or we can make one that will last forever and cost about $10.

The concept of a foam roller is essentially just a cylindrical object that is hard enough to smush your muscles and tissue, to put it crudely. It doesn't even have to be foam at all. The downside of foam is that as you smash into it, it eventually loses it's rigidity over time. The common solution to this is to just use a PVC pipe instead. It will never lose it's rigidity unless you take a heat gun to it and melt it. And even then it will harden back up once it cools, though it would be quite deformed then and useless for rolling

• Your local hardware store should have 4 inch diameter PVC pipe already cut into 2 foot lengths.
• Perfect, you don't even have to cut the pipe at all. They cost around $3 a piece.
• . The issue is that the pipe may have a tendency to slide across the floor rather than roll. The pipe is completely smooth and therefore does not grip well. Since your relaxed muscle tissue is squishy the pipe will grip into your body a bit, especially if you are rolling against bare skin, but depending on the floor surface it may not grip into the floor and instead the pipe will just slide across the floor.
• it has to get traction on the floor surface.
• put foam on top of it.

 We don't do this to soften the pipe or make it more comfortable. We just do it to give the pipe some grip so it won't slide.

•  Look around for "pipe insulation".
• This is about a 1/4 inch thick foam tubing that you wrap around the outside of pipes. They likely won't have them for 4 inch pipes, but that's okay. Just buy whatever size they have and you can cut it into 2 foot lengths and piece them together around your larger pipe. Make sure you get enough, depending on the length of the foam and the length of your roller. You will probably need 2 or 3 packages of foam
• Use duct tape to make double sided tape by wrapping pieces into a circle with sticky side out. 
•  Cut the foam to the length of your pipe.
•  Wrap your foam around the pipe. The duct tape will hold it in place.
•  Do this piece by piece until your whole pipe is covered.
• It doesn't matter how pretty it looks, you're not going to see this puzzle of foam anyway
• Once the pipe is completely wrapped in foam, wrap duct tape tightly around the entire thing, sticky side down. This will ensure that the foam won't move or come off
• That's it for the foam roller. It's strong. It will never lose it's firmness, and the outside is just squishy enough to grip so that it won't slide.
  So, the pipe should be about $3. The duct tape is like $4 for a whole roll, of which you won't use it all, and the foam is about $1 or so per package. Go to the store and look at the yoga foam rollers and you'll pay $25. Well you won't pay anything to look at them, but if you buy them they're about $25 or more. Not only is our DIY design a much better product, it's a third of the cost.

-Carl                   HOME MADE STRENGTH