Today, we're going to show you how to build
one of the coolest looking fountains I've ever seen.
[Music]
Guys, it's been a while
since we've built a tabletop fountain,
and I love making tabletop fountains.
I've got another really cool one that I'm excited
that I figured out how to build.
This fountain was inspired
by a channel called Living Positively,
which had a video on this type of fountain about 10 years ago.
It showed the fountain looking at a little bit in
what's now considered pretty low resolution.
It didn't really say how everything was built.
So I've worked out how to make that type of fountain,
and we're going to show you step-by-step
how to build one yourself.
Here's the basic idea.
We'll use a small pump
and a specially shaped nozzle to get a domed mushroom of water.
We'll then use a water vaporizer
and some colored lights to kick it up a notch.
First off, we've got our bucket.
This is what our whole fountain is going to be housed in.
The size can change quite a bit.
This is much taller than it needs to be.
You really only need four inches of height.
While this is about the smallest diameter we can use,
you could have a much larger diameter,
and there would be no adverse effects.
The next thing we're going to need is a pump.
Now, there are lots of types of waterproof submersible pumps.
This particular pump comes with an additional piece,
this ring light here,
and you can actually fit this in between the other pieces.
I don't really like this ring light.
It has multiple colors going at once,
and there's no control over it.
It's just not my preference.
Most importantly for this project,
one of the attachments is this.
It's designed for making sort of mushroom bubbles of water.
It's pretty neat, but a very simple idea.
The water flows up through this tube,
which is just being held right there,
and you can see with the shape of this, it all goes flowing,
goes up and out,
hits the edge and just bubbles over on both sides.
In fact, on all sides, creating a round bubble.
This piece is held in place with friction.
You can move it up
and down just by grabbing it and pulling it up,
or pushing it back down,
and that's going to change the shape
and the size of your bubble by a little bit.
Just because you're changing the pressure of the water,
and how far it has to travel
before it hits the shape piece of plastic.
This pump comes with a couple other pieces as well,
and most of these are just extensions.
So you can choose
how high you want the mushroom piece to go.
And our bucket here,
we are going to need a little bit of extra height,
because we're going to want this to sit well
outside the top of the bucket.
So it's a good thing we've got these extension pieces.
Let's do a quick test with some water to make sure
this is fountaining the way we want it to.
Start out with this test.
We're just gonna add enough water
that our pump is covered.
We don't need to fill the bucket all the way.
Now, this pump on the front, it's adjustable.
If you have it open all the way, its maximum volume of water.
If we have it closed, it's only a little bit of water.
We're actually going to start with it closed about
as much as we can,
and then we'll open it up because if we put too much,
it's likely just spray all over the place,
and that's not what we're going for.
Alright, there we go.
We can see what our fountain is trying to do here.
We've got the water flowing up through the fountain,
bubbling out into this cool round mushroom shape.
We are trying to get a little bit bigger
of a fountain in it, so I'm going to reach in,
and I'm going to open the valve on our fountain
so that it's a...
More water is flowing through.
It's a tricky balance.
That's not bad right there.
I'm liking that pretty well.
When you were measuring this,
one of the interesting things to take into account is
that this bubble can actually be filled up with more air,
so it can fluctuate,
especially if there's any air flow in the area.
So, let's see
if I can blow any in, and make it a little bit bigger.
[Music]
There we go.
I got it to go so big that it's actually overflowing.
I can pop the bubble, and it shrinks back down.
Pretty crazy that it works that well.
It's actually made such a complete sheet of water
that it just stops letting any air out.
Now, we can see how this is working.
It's pretty cool.
Super smooth, complete bubble going around there.
Let's turn this off for a bit.
We don't want these cords coming up out of the top
of our fountain super visible and everything,
so we're going to do something similar to what we've done
in the past,
and that's to drill
a couple small holes into the side of the bucket,
and have the cords coming out there.
I'm putting mine on the back.
I don't want the handle to be super prominent.
So I'm going to call this the back,
and this is where I'm going to drill holes.
[Music]
This cord is not going to fit through that hole.
So we're gonna have to do something
that we've done in the past, and that's cut the cord off,
and splice it back on.
We've got our cords through the hole.
This one went to the light.
I don't want the light on this,
so I'm actually going to trim this cord even shorter,
just to about right there.
First, we need to make this waterproof.
Our bucket is going to be full of water.
We don't want it all leaking right there.
So we're going to use some hot glue,
and we are going to try
and make a very water tight seal around this.
We'll use a little bit of electrical tape to just
hold the smaller wire
that used to go to the light on to the rest of the cord,
make it a little less visible and obvious.
To secure down and cover up the end of this wire
that used to be attached to the light,
we're just going to use a little bit of heat shrink.
We're going to put that down over the cord,
and make sure it overlaps with the end of the wire,
so there's no exposed metal wire that we could touch
that has electricity running through it.
For the rest of this wire,
the main plug that runs the fountain,
we do want to solder back together one of the two wires.
However, the other wire, we're going to leave unsoldered.
And we're going to use
that to add in a little feed through switched.
That way, we should be able to turn the fountain on and off
just by flipping a switch,
and without having to unplug it every time.
[Music]
Excellent.
That's just what we want to see.
Next step, we want to add a little bit of magic to that,
and for that, we are using this thing,
which is a water vaporizer.
It's an ultrasonic vaporizer.
This little plate right here is a piece of ceramic,
and when you turn this thing on,
it vibrates at several thousand times per second.
They're really interesting.
The way it splashes the water up
out actually just causes the droplets to break
apart into these tiny tiny little particles.
It just looks like mist,
and when you put this
under water about an inch and a half to three inches of water,
it starts putting out vapors.
Crazy, right?
Look at that.
Good amount of mist right there.
That's pure water vapor.
There's nothing else involved.
No chemicals.
No changes in temperature.
Interestingly enough,
if you put your finger in the path of it,
it actually starts to like heat up the inside of your hand,
and it hurts a lot.
So be careful when you're using these things,
because you can really hurt yourself.
This bucket is going
to be filled almost all the way with water,
and we're going to use some
of this colored glass to help
disperse the light just overall make the whole effect nicer,
clean it up,
but we don't want the glass on top of this.
This needs a clear path
from the ultrasonic plate up to the top of the water.
And what we're going to use as a shield is a piece
of this ABS pipe.
We're going to fit this inside a piece of this pipe,
and then we're just going to cut about an inch
and a half above that,
and we're going to use that as a sort of barrier
to keep the glass from getting in there.
Once again, we've got chords that we need to hide.
In this case, we have a cord
that we want to come out the side of the PVC pipe,
and then we're going to want to come out the side of the bucket.
To allow the cord to hang down right where we want it,
we're going to use a saw to just cut a straight line down
to about the midpoint,
so we can have it turn and head right out.
[Music]
Now, we're going to use just a little bit of hot glue
to hold this in place.
So it's attached to our pipe,
and not just free floating around in there.
This gap at the bottom is probably enough
that it would keep a constant flow of water into there,
along with the slit on the side,
but just to be sure,
let's drill a couple holes into it.
That should do it right there.
Water can easily get in,
and it has a clear path to shoot its water out the top.
Let's give it a test.
In fact, working great.
Just what we want to see.
We're going to want this set up so the black pipe is
just at the surface of our water level,
and so, we can kind of choose about where we want that to be.
I want it quite close to the top of our,
bucket but not all the way there,
and then with the cord, same as last time,
we're going to want to attach it into the side of the bucket.
Now, this chord is a little bit different than most.
It actually comes apart
so there's a second portion of it.
Maybe, it's designed to be a plug.
Maybe it's just designed to hold everything in place.
But if we use the right size of drill bit,
you actually might be able to use that as a plug right
into the side of our bucket.
Well, our plug sort of fits into our whole,
but because our drill bit
didn't cut a superfine clean edge on it,
we're going to want to stop
that up with a little bit more hot glue.
Just to make sure it's watertight.
Let's add a switch
into our ultrasonic vaporizer as well.
[Music]
Just what we want to see.
Let's start adding some of our glass rocks down in here.
Those are going to do a few different things.
One, they're just going to add a nice look to the whole thing.
We're going to be adding some waterproof LED remote
controlled lights inside there.
It's going to do a really
good job of diffusing that light all over,
and holding them up.
And three, to lift up
the ultrasonic vaporizer a little bit so it's higher,
and it's going to be sitting on top of some of the rocks.
[Music]
Oh, I like that.
Okay.
Well, I'm going to try turning it on,
but we'll see where it is right now.
[Music]
We may have lucked out.
All the plastic pieces
that fit together adding up to make the extension
for this have a little bit of play in them.
So if we aren't quite centered,
we can usually just push it a little bit.
Let's try turning on the fog.
[Music]
This is what looks so good.
We've now got a little bubble that's just full of vapor,
like all the time.
It's just--
Oh, it's magical.
Then, you can, you can poke it,
and the vapor just all leaks out all of a sudden.
It seriously just like otherworldly,
like this doesn't look like a thing
that you can just have, just full of smoke and stuff,
but it works so well.
I love this thing.
[Music]
There we have it.
What I think really is probably the coolest looking fountain
that we've ever built in the show.
I love the way this looks.
It's seriously just like some weird alien creature.
When it fills with mist,
and then you can like let the mist out,
being able to blow it up and pop it again.
Not that hard to build.
Honestly, you can do this whole thing in an hour easily.
There are links in the description
for where to buy the pump and the ultrasonic vaporizer.
As for the bucket and glass, you don't have to use glass,
that's just what we use because we had it available.
Whatever you want to do, lots of variety.
I actually probably would recommend a slightly
larger container.
Maybe something,
you know planter that's about that wide across,
and the reason for that is
that it doesn't splash or leak too much
when it's just sitting here,
but when you turn it on and off,
it does have a tendency to splash a little bit like this.
Got out on the sides there.
And then turning it on is even more splashy.
When it first kicks in,
it doesn't always kick in a nice even circle at first.
So I used a little bucket because I like the compact look.
It all just stays together.
However, this does need to be mounted outside as it is,
because otherwise, we're just going to get water
all over every time I turn it on and off.
Love this project.
This is a seriously fun-looking fountain.
I am super happy with how it turned out.
Thanks again to the channel Living Positively for the idea
for this fountain.
It's really cool,
and your channel is the only place I've seen it
before building it in real life.
So I'm really glad it worked out.
Guys, that's not all.
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Talk to you then.