In today's video, we're building an optical illusion.
It looks like a waterfall,
but it's underwater, and it's small enough
that you can have it in your house.
[Music]
I'm Nate.
And I'm Calli, and today,
I'm going to teach you how you can make
your own underwater waterfall.
What it looks like is a waterfall,
but it's already under water.
I can show you how to do that.
So here's the basic idea.
With some supplies from your local hardware store
and pet store,
you can use sand and air to create
an optical illusion underwater.
The supplies that we have here are actually available
at most local stores.
So we have got some rigid insulation foam,
some PVC pipes,
and a PCL bend,
bamboo skewers, the Great Stuff, an air pump, aquarium tubing.
This is what is called an air stone,
and some sand.
Too fine of a grit,
and what you're going to get instead
of a nice beautiful waterfall is actually very cloudy water.
Too course of a sand,
and what you're going to end up with is a waterfall
that just doesn't work.
So to begin with,
we're going to need our bamboo skewers,
a really really good box cutter knife,
and the foam,
and the glue gun, and with that,
we can start assembling.
So not all tank pumps are created equal.
This is a 3.5 watt.
You want a stronger pump,
even if this doesn't seem stronger,
this is good for a 20 to 30 gallon tank.
We're using a 10 gallon tank.
We're not just using the 2 inch piece
of rigid insulation foam just for stability sake,
this is also
because you can carve into it really nicely.
Makes it a lot easier than trying to add
a 4 inch layer of expanding foam
that's going to take a week to dry.
All right, we've got all of our supplies.
So let's start assembling.
The first step is to measure and cut our rigid insulation foam.
The foam is going to end up floating a lot on water
if we just put it in there by itself,
but the tank does have this sort of lip along the top edge,
and so even though we're going to add some anchors on the bottom,
we want to try and make sure that it's pretty snug,
so it holds itself in place.
So it doesn't end up floating up.
The back of our tank is going to have one piece of foam
that runs aways,
and then it's going to turn a little bit of an angle,
and we're going to use that turn,
partly for decorative effect,
but also because we need to hide some of the hardware behind it.
Looks like we need to go to about 11 and 1/4 inches high,
but we are going to have some attachment points on the bottom
that should add a little bit of thickness to it.
So 14 by 11 and 1/4.
[Music]
So to remind you that the piece of hardware
that we're hiding is a one-inch piece of PVC.
It has to be able to fit in here,
and plenty of room to catch our waterfall
without it being seen.
This piece is the same height, so it should fit nicely.
But now it needs to be made to fit kind of right here.
[Music]
Our exacto knife wasn't quite long enough for this cut.
So I'm just using a saw.
Yes, they are in place.
Yes, they're not really going anywhere.
However, we want to carve this up to make it look like rocks.
We want to add some expanding foam for the same reason,
so we have more room to carve.
We need these two pieces to never come apart.
So now, we got to glue them together.
I'm going to break off a few bamboo skewers,
so that everything stays in place.
So that when we pop this out, nothing moves.
So that we glue it in the right position.
And then after that, we will add our expanding foam.
This is a little mist spray bottle.
Just has some warm water in it,
and this can help make the foam cure just a little bit faster.
[Music]
Where the waterfall itself goes,
add a little bit more,
and the reason why is because you want to be able to choose
how your waterfall is going to flow.
The more foam that you have,
the more options you have for carving it out.
And if you go a little bit overboard,
that's fine.
This is not a hard stuff to carve,
so we can fix that in minutes.
Fix it and post.
So think about cliffs.
Think about the way that rock formations kind of jut out.
You've got those little overhangs,
things like that.
Now, it's decorative.
We've got a lot of foam on here,
and even though we've added some spray water
to try and speed up the cure time,
it's going to take quite a while before it's ready to be carved.
So we're gonna actually let this cure like over the weekend
before we start cutting into it.
In the meantime,
we've got some mechanical parts we can build.
We're actually going to build the pump itself,
so we can even show you
how that's going to fit into place,
how it's going to work, and even give it a test run.
L bracket...
Yes.
And we did drill a hole in this,
so that our hose connection be threaded down into it.
Exactly.
This is going to be
what actually causes the air flow to bring
our waterfall up in just a bit.
[Music]
It fits down,
and you don't end up with a kink in the line.
That will cause the air flow to stop.
When you have an L bracket,
there's about a 3/4 of an inch lip there,
and what that does is hold the PVC piece in place.
So when you put it in, you lose that amount of PVC.
So you want to make sure you do
that first so you get a correct measurement.
Now, what we're going to do is figure out exactly
how high we want this to be.
This is upside down.
Just so you know, this is not the way it goes.
For measuring purposes only.
Yes.
Is that--
So that's the height of the top of the pipes should--
This will be the top of the pipe.
Now, you've got to remember this is going to go through.
The reason we're doing this
is that the top of the pipe will go through,
and then we're going to have a lip,
we'll explain that later.
So now, we're going to cut our PVC to about that point.
[Music]
Beautiful.
It's actually going to go in the corner.
I know that seems a little bit odd.
The reason why,
so when the water in the underwater waterfall gathers,
it's going to come down at an angle.
You want to make sure it can all be caught.
Now, this will of course be in here.
It's going to be a little bit easier,
but gives you an idea.
You want it all to kind of gather in this little triangle.
The point of an air stone is that it oxygenates the water.
It makes it a little bit easier for the fish themselves
to you know, be happy.
This air pump is designed to just,
I mean, to pump air through the hose down into the air stone.
If we didn't have the air stone,
all of the bubbles just come out here is pretty big bubbles,
and the goal is to actually
to get the oxygen to dissolve into the water.
We're going to be using are to lift the sand.
So this tube and stone will go inside of our PVC pipe.
When it gets surrounded by sand,
the air bubbles flying up will lift some
of that sand with it,
and then that gets poured out the top.
But right now,
if we had this air stone inside the PVC set on the ground,
no sand could get to it.
So we need to give the sand an access point
into our PVC pipe.
So this actually has two pumps.
But I'm only using one.
So, is there a correct way to couple this?
Yes.
Am I going to jerry-rig it?
Yes.
[Music]
So then, it just comes down
to how close do you want the pump to your tank.
So I like to give it a little bit of room,
which is actually good.
That's what I've got.
So we'll do that side about there,
and then we'll have just enough.
[Music]
Plug it.
[Music]
Seems pretty sealed.
All right, let's try it.
Go and lift it up.
Let's see.
We've got a nice water flow, that's actually decent.
See how high you can lift it up, and still get a water flow.
Okay, so a couple inches out of the water,
but that's fine.
This whole thing is going to stay submerged,
and will be nice and quiet.
So now, let's see if we can add some sand.
And now we're covered in it.
That should be enough.
So let's go and test it out.
Okay, so far so good.
[Music]
Okay.
>> Sand is falling. >> So you can see--
Now, this is pretty cool.
You can see that even
though we've been pumping the sand,
the water has stayed pretty nice and clear,
and that's because we did a lot of work to clean our sand.
I know, it's sand,
it's not going to get not sandy.
But what we're trying to do is remove the extra small particles
that would just float throughout the water,
and make it really hard to see through.
So let's take a look at how we can clean off
our sand to get only the size of particles that we want.
This is some of our unwashed sand,
and you can see that when I add water to it,
the water gets really murky.
You swirl it around a little bit,
and the water is getting murky.
That's what we're trying to remove.
We're going to pour all this sand into a sieve,
and then rinse it off with a hose.
[Music]
Now, we can see that it's full of water,
but even if we just get the sand swirling up a bit,
it immediately settles back down,
and it's clear again.
That's because we've washed all of the dirt
and silt off of the sand.
We just have the larger grains, nothing to murk up the water.
So that's what we need to do
with our sand before running it through our pump,
or the whole tank is just going to go cloudy.
All right, so it's been a least 48 hours,
and our expanding foam is very dry.
So now, it's ready to be carved.
We're going to carve that out.
We're going to add in our pump system,
and then we're going to make sure everything looks nice
and decorated at all.
Next part is just making sure
that we know where the waterfall itself is going to be,
so placement.
We kind of formed this little ledge here,
because we know
that we want the waterfall to come out of this area.
Then we're going to form sort of a pool
for everything to fall into,
and then it's going to fall back
so that we have a full circular system.
All the air and sand will be coming up,
and getting shot out the front,
and we don't want it shooting.
We want it falling.
So what we need to do is carve into the foam a little bit,
and then have it slope.
So the sand hits that sloped portion,
and just gets angled down to our waterfall area.
We have a spot marked off here,
and we need to carve into the foam,
and then down a little bit.
So there's going to be some tricky angles going on here.
I think we'll probably use the drill a little bit.
But because we don't want to just go straight through,
we're not going to drill like a tunnel into it.
We're just going to carve it out a little bit,
and we now need to add
sort of like angled hole aiming out that direction,
at about 45 degrees.
As far as the drop, we've already got that set.
Now what we need is we need a feedback loop.
We need to carve
like a receiving pool where all the sand is going to land,
and flow back down to the bottom of that pipe.
Trial and error has taught me that the best way to do
that is actually the carve from the back again.
We're going to start here.
We're going to make a little mark.
We're going to carve upward,
and then once we figure out where that's going to come up,
then we can start aesthetically carving.
And up here, we'll open that up as well.
We'll recess this whole area back in,
so the waterfall has more area to fall.
Hopefully, we'll try and make it look like a rock.
[Music]
We've got our foam carved out to look like rocks.
I think we're pretty much ready to go on that.
So next step is to make it look like rocks.
We've got some good shapes, but we don't have good colors.
I think it's time to paint this.
So when it comes to painting something like this,
you don't have to break the bank.
These are of course, just regular acrylic paint
that you can get at any craft store.
Now, the important thing is
if you're going to be putting something living in this tank,
you don't want foam acrylic.
That's bad.
So we have Plasti Dip.
Now, everything that I have read online says that
if we can coat this well enough,
multiple times with Plasti Dip,
it should be safe for aquatic animals.
Now, don't take my word for it.
I don't want to kill your fish.
So once you do this, once you let it dry,
once everything seems like it's working,
and you have a filtration system running for a couple of days,
go get the water tested.
And if everything works out, it should be all right to go.
[Music]
Here's the plan.
Acrylic paint dries pretty quick,
but we want to speed that process up even more.
So we're going to put in front of fan.
This is what I use to blow dry my hair every morning!
Takes about two seconds.
[Music]
Okay.
So we had industrial velcro strips that you can put
on the bottom of this to hold this in place.
However, this tank
has a lip that's going to hold it in place.
We made this very close fitting
to the size of the tank, which it was really difficult
for us to squish it down into the tank.
But now that it's in there, it's in there.
I'm quite confident we'll be able to fill this with water.
Yeah.
Okay, so we have got our backing,
we've got our tank.
Now, let's go ahead and actually get the waterfall in place.
And that should fit snug in the place.
Perfect.
We have a double hose for this air pump.
We're going to start with one,
see if we need more power than that.
All right, let's make it pretty first.
Let's see if I can even get these--
We made like a little cave.
I want to see
if I can even get these in here now.
Oh yeah, okay.
I will never be able to move them,
but I can get them.
Some of our larger ones, we also painted gold,
just for pretty.
[Music]
You can kind of see
where we've got our tube going down.
Now, we're going to go ahead, and add the sand first,
and then we're going to fill this with water.
See what happens.
[Music]
The water is a little cloudy right now.
I may have forgotten to rinse the rocks that I got.
If you were to coat this so it was safe for a fish,
or anything like that,
and you were to put in an actual filtration system,
that'd be gone in an hour.
We won't have any problems.
All right, so we have assembled our tank.
We have let the water settle,
and I added a pet.
His name is Steve.
Should we get to actually see if this works?
Let's try it.
So you can obviously tell when you get up close
that it is sand,
but just as a decoration in your living room,
if somebody sees us from across the room,
it really does look like an underwater waterfall.
It's really cool.
[Music]
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