PVC bongs safe?

Last night I mentioned in a different thread that I'm thinking about building a PVC bong. I googled to see if anyone else had put their designs for such a bong online, but all I found were sites saying to never make a piece out of PVC because the resulting fumes are toxic. However, many said that as long as you don't use PVC for the bowl (which is obvious) you're fine.

I'm thinking this will be perfectly safe to use as long as the bowl is made from glass or metal and is a few inches away from the PVC so the lighter has no chance of heating it up. There's no way the smoke itself is hot enough to cause the PVC to release vapors.

Am I right?

Just dont melt the plasticy/rubbery stuff. That's baaaad.

The fumes would still be toxic to a degree, because I do not believe it takes a terrible amount of heat to entice PVC to became a gas.

you would be supirsed how little heat it takes to release shitty chems in plastic, for the chamber it would be ok but still not to good but absolutely dont have it near,touching, or have the smoke pass over it unless its been filtered alreay in the water and cooled

my first steam roller was about a 3foot long 1 1/2'' diameter PVC pipe... as long as the plastic isn't being heated really bad it'll be ok, but heat that shit up ..well burn pvc pipe by it's self and watch the black smoke billow... i always had something insulating heat between the metal bowl and the hole in which the bowl was held in... not very easy to do sometimes, hot glue will work, but if you smoke too much outta it at one time the bowl will heat up and the glue will melt.. one i use on my metal steam roller seems to of worked fine.

what i did was take a plastic bottle cap, put a hole in it a little bit smaller then the thread of the bowl, put a lighter to the hole for a few seconds and screwed the bowl into it, it creates threads so that i can remove the bowl easily... then i took the bowl out, and fitted the bottle cap over the hole in the metal tube, by taking a lighter to the sides of the cap for a good long while, then pressing down til it formed the curves, so that it was almost a seamless fit, taped it down real good, and that was it.

kinda hard to see but here are some pics

PVC fumes are seriously toxic, as in potentially fatal. Its actually becomming a big issue because so much is used in buildings and in the case of fire people can die from the PVC fumes long before the fire or smoke kills them. I've done a lot of work with PVC and will often heat it up to make it soft and bendable. Whenever I do I use a big exaust fan, make sure the area I'm in is really well ventilated, and wear a mask.

Depending on how you design your bong you may or may not have a problem. But why chance it. Find some acrylic tubing instead. Its a little harder to work with but will be a lot safer. Plus the clear acrylic will look a lot better than white PVC. Look in the phone book under plastics and start calling.