I'm Basically Done...

Spout Completion

Finished testing spout length, then cut them and glued them in.  Then I stained them.

Power Cord Splicing

*Snip, snip*

Now I can feed the cord through the drain hole in the pot. Yaaaay!

Cord's outer vinyl has been stripped as has the three cords' individual vinyl sheaths.

Soldered, then sealed with heat shrink tubing.  The charred tubing is because I used an open flame as opposed to a hot air gun.

Everything wrapped up in a liberal amount of electrical tape.

Also added some flamboyant red duct tape for good measure.  Its a good indicator of where the splicing occurred and serves as a warning measure.  Not that water could get into the sealed joints anyways.  Still never hurts to be safe.

Base Assembly

It took quite a bit of manhandling to get everything to fit right...

I bolted the bracket to the screen in an ingenious way of avoiding gluing down the main frame.  The tight fitted screen keeps everything in place and sturdy.

Sealed the power cord hole with a healthy amount of silicone.  Hopefully I got everything...

Pebble Cleaning

Look at how disgusting those rocks are...

It took about 5 to 6 violent rinsings to get the rocks this nice looking.

Spout Testing

Today I drilled spout holes, constructed spouts, and ran some tests to determine the optimal spout length for the spouts that will come from the top of each tier.  The testing was slow going and I only got done with the spout for the top tier.

A 5/8" hole for a spout.  The OD of the PVC I was using for the spouts was about .84".  So I widened the "pilot" holes...

The widened holes.  I used a sanding drum on my Dremel, shown on the left.

My testing set-up.  I used a large cooler as a temporary water reservoir.

A clear view of how I kept the base in place on the chair using bungies

A shot showing the water being routed from the cooler into the fountain mainframe and up into the first tier

I ran into one problem that I couldn't fix with changing the spout length.  The rate that the pump put out water, even on the lowest setting, was too high for my design to handle.  It actually pumped up faster than the spout put out water into the next tier.  This caused water to overflow from the top of the first tier.  I constrained the flow on the pump output to combat this.

Here's how I constrained the pump output/tier input.  I just shoved some vinyl tubing down into the plastic fitting that goes through the plug.  This caused an increase in the water's initial velocity (as was evident by water shooting 2 feet out of the first tier when I first turned on the pump) but also caused a significant decrease in the pressure.  The increased velocity didn't matter much when the first tier was full of water, but the pressure drop was definitely noticeable and fixed the problem I described above.

It's Getting There...

...And not a minute too soon either - I have to present in 10 days!  Yesterday I got quite a bit done.

An overview of what I got done yesterday.  You can see I glued the Polycarb bracket on.

I screwed the PVC frame together.

A picture from the other side

What's this?  I cut the tiers off right above the bracket for ease of assembly in the pot and for access in case something goes wrong.  The plugs act as an inner coupling and as plugs to keep water in the upper segment of each tier.

Here's all of the upper segments removed.  The only one that doesn't have the coupling/plug adhered is the biggest tier.  For that one the plug is in the base.  The reason for this will be explained in a bit.

What the base looks like with all 3 tiers removed

Here's the plug for the largest tier. Its friction-adhered into the base because it has tubing going up into it...

...As you can see here.  This leads up to the makeshift barbed fitting that is glued to and feeds up through the plug.

The e-putty that holds the polycarb bracket in place.  Look at those thumb prints!

Is That Really PVC?

Yesterday I finally got around to actually making this fountain look a bit more natural.  I bamboo-ified the PVC!  Yay!

First I burned in fake nodes with a propane torch (which was being annoyingly temperamental in the sub-freezing weather).  The burned plastic gives the appearance of a darkened wood color and the softened plastic allowed me to compress the pipe and give the nodes a wider diameter than the rest of the pipe.  So the benefits of scorching the plastic for the nodes were two-fold.

Then I stained the PVC with Shellac (actually not a wood stain per se, it's more a wax based paint).  What you see below is after two coats (ignore the messy work bench).

Looks pretty nice, huh?

Polycarbonate Bracket

So the rock support I've been working on lately has proved to be pretty temperamental.  I was at a loss for a way to support the mesh around the PVC tiers, but came up with a method of doing so today.  It also acts as a bracket to further constrain the PVC into the desired orientation and spacing.

First I whipped up what I wanted on CAD...

 

...And then proceeded to print out a template from the recently constructed CAD file.  I glued it onto a spare piece of 1/4" polycarbonate I found in the garage so I could use it to essentially trace cuts into the plastic.

 

I then cut it out with a high speed rotary tool using a saw bit for the straight lines.  For the curves and the circles I made a makeshift router by clamping my Dremel facing up in my vice, and then moved the plastic to make the cuts with a tiny drill bit.  Below is the finished product, with the template remains still adhered to one side.

All finished and fulfilling one of its intended purposes (spacing the tiers):

Plug Work and Pebble Support

Wow, its been a while!  My last post was in September, damn... well I kind of needed to get started again - I'm presenting on March 15.  And I'm probably only a little over half-way done.  So yeah, today's progress:

Here are my reservoir plugs that go a bit below the top of each 'bamboo' segment.  See those ugly stickers that would get goopy residue in the water supply?

Bam! A liberal amount of acetone later, the ugliness is gone!  Good thing I don't live in California...

Here I drilled through one of them so that the tubing from the pump output could fill the reservoir in the highest tier.  I then solvent welded in a segment of plastic pipe that had a .5" OD - which is a tight fit on the ID of the tubing.  This allowed me to have a fitting of sorts for the tubing.

And here's the back end where the tubing goes on.  Note the chamfered lip to allow the tubing to slide on easier.  You can also see the yellowed bulge where I attempted to replicate a barbed fitting by heating the plastic with a torch and then compressing it.

Next up I completed the frame that will support the pebbles (which will hide the pump and fountain internals).

Here it is removed from the pot.  Its made of vinyl tubing, some modified PVC fittings, and piping.

Here I laid the mesh I would use to support the rocks out over the pot so I could cut it to the right shape.

And that's what I got done today.  Wooooo!

Mock-up

Today I cut some pieces of PVC just to see how everything would look. Yay!

I also tested out the pump for the first time today, and DAYUM does that thing put out water! I'm hoping that maybe making the reservoir in the first tier larger, so that the pump will have to also work against a decent amount of water pressure (as opposed to piping the pump right to the outlet on the first tier), will sufficiently decrease the GPH on this puppy.