Hey guys welcome back, thanks for joining us today on the king of random. Not too long ago,
we showed you how to make a desktop
vortex fountain, something that used to pump in a small cistern of water, pumped it up into a cup in a spiral so that as
it drained out, it forms sort of a water tornado. Well that was pretty cool, but today
we're gonna try and suit that up to make a larger,
full-size vortex fountain and we have a couple of twists
we're gonna add in as well. The basic idea is the same. This orange bucket we'll be using as our cistern down below.
We have a pump that can move up to 550 gallons of water per hour.
Instead of the drinking straw we used on the miniature one
We've got this flexible vinyl hosing. We'll make this drink dispenser the part of our fountain that houses the vortex.
We also have this plastic 16 inch diameter tray
One of the first things we need to do is to take off all of the excess pieces that come with this drink dispenser.
It's got a lot of cool accessories, but we're not going to use them.
Now we also want to remove the spigot here, but after we remove it we do want to keep this thicker rubber seal that's on the outside
One of the first steps will take is giving ourselves an attachment method for the hose outside of the container that will also angle the
water on the inside of the container. At Ace Hardware,
I managed to find these plastic pieces that turn at an angle and are smaller on one side than at the other so that they
link together nicely the smaller end also fits perfectly with our three-eighths inch vinyl hose
What we're going to do is fit the narrow end of one of these elbows through the hole where the spigot was in our drink
container. We will then attach the other elbow to the first one through the container.
Because the hole is larger than the piece of plastic going through it,
we're also going to take the rubber seal that was on the spigot and use that to seal everything up. Now that may hold water
a little bit, but we want to make sure it's 100% waterproof
So we're also going to take our hot glue gun and spread a ring of warm glue around this edge
And then we'll put this on and press the rubber down into that. That should give us a really nice seal that will never leak
Now while that's cooling
let's also drill a hole in the very center of the bottom of our vortex chamber a
3/8 inch drill bit is smaller than the diameter of the pipe leading into this chamber and our pump should give us enough volume of
Water that it can keep up with a hole 3/8 inch wide
With the point of entry and exit for the water
We need to drill similarly placed holes in our plastic tray. Just a note about this plastic tray.
I found this one at a thrift store for about two bucks
If you don't happen to have any of these available at your local thrift store, any
plastic tray about this size should work as long as it has a little bit of a lip on the edge
This one is 16 inches in diameter. First we'll drill a hole in the very center
That's where the water will drain down through after it leaves the vortex chamber now the water after it leaves the vortex chamber and is
Going through this tray. It doesn't need to come through a perfectly sized
Hole that just barely lets all the water through it can have plenty of space on the sides
So I'm actually going to use a larger drill bit and just give a hole about an inch wide in the middle of this tray
When we have the hole in our vortex chamber lined up perfectly with the hole in our plastic tray we can see
Approximately where we need to drill the second hole that will let the tube come up from the pump to feed water into our tank
Once again this hole doesn't have to be exactly the same size as the hose it can be a little bit larger
I'm not gonna stick with the 1-inch. I'm gonna take it down just a little bit
I've got my three-quarter inch drill bit and that's what I'm gonna use for our second hole in the tray
We've got two holes drilled into our tray one hole drilled into the center of the bottom of our vortex chamber and of course one
Spot where the piping is going to take the water up from the pump
into our vortex
chamber once our hole fountain is up and running some of the water will be filling out of the vortex chamber and landing on the
Tray to help it drain faster back into the bucket. We're gonna drill just a few more holes in it
I do want to make sure all of the holes are set
fairly far in if they're out near the edges that will actually be wider than where the bucket was and all the water will just
drain onto the ground
For these holes I'm going one step smaller and using a 5/8 inch drill bit
Our plastic tray now has eight holes drilled into it now
Let's set this aside and work on our pump for a minute
This pump is designed to be submerged completely underwater as it's working it has a nozzle at the top
Where all the water will spray out?
what we need to do is use our hose to connect this nozzle to the
Input of our vortex tank when our pump is in the bucket you can see we won't actually need all that much hose it will
Need to connect from about here to here to make sure that we have enough while we do our accurate measurement
I'm just gonna cut off an extra six inches of it, and then do our measuring from there this 3/8 inch
Hose is a little bit too small to fit over the nozzle easily
But I found if you just kind of wiggle it and press it you can actually get it on fairly
Well as you can see this vinyl tubing really likes to curl itself up, and we want to be pointing basically straight
So what we're gonna try and do is use a little bit of heat to make it soft enough that we can straighten it out
And then have it cooled down like that there. We go. That's way better in terms of shape
We'll just let that cool down a little bit and it'll be a lot straighter
Alright our hose has now been warmed up reshaped a little bit and cooled down and it's being much more agreeable
standing mostly straight up
So let's try throwing the pump into the bucket putting the tray on top and running the hose through the hole to see how long
We need to cut this off now see that we want to cut our hose off right about here
Beautiful
That right into the nozzle hole in the center of our vortex chamber lines up wonderfully with the hole in the tray
That's just how we want it to look at this point
I think we are ready to put water in the bucket and give our vortex chamber a test now
We need to make sure that we have enough water in the buckets what we're going to do is we're going to pour water in
Until it completely covers the pump and then we want to add at least the volume of this container on top of that
That way no matter. How full this gets our pump will have enough water to keep going
All right, that's a bucket full of water and since we're at the sink
Let's just do some testing right here in case it spills anywhere all right here goes
The see quite a good volume of water comes out of this thing it's a good little pump
Already got a little bit of a vortex forming in there
And even though the water is draining out the bottom. It's pumping in fast enough that the water level continues to climb
This whole apparatus is a little bit of a slope right now partly because it's in the sink
which I think has a sloped bottom and also because the power cord from the pump is in between the bucket and
The tray over here, and it's making it tilt on one side that is a whirlpool from top to bottom
Just what we want to see
All right, we know. It's working. I'm gonna unplug it and let it drain
Now of course there's no more water coming in but still draining out the middle
So it just keeps going with the whirlpool as the water level drops all right that worked great now
There are a few changes. I want to make so it works. Even more smoothly one of the first things
I want to change is I'm going to cut a notch in the top of the bucket so that when the cord fits in that
Notch the tray can sit flush on the top
So I'm just going to mark a spot on our bucket where I want the notch to be then I'll get a saw and cut
That down
Perfect now our cord can just sit right there and
Our tray will sit flush on top of that cutting a notch in the bucket is the first modification
I wanted to do the second is a little bit more colorful
I have here a string of LED strip lighting which can be made to shine in a whole big variety of colors and patterns and
the power system that drives it all the plan is that the strip of LEDs will come in through the side of the tray and
Wrap around the inside of the bottom of our vortex fountain that way we can choose the color of our fountain lights
We'll drill a small hole in the bottom of the tray run the lighting through there
And then we'll use hot glue to seal that off
There should be
Plenty, but just to be sure I'll give myself another
Foot and that's where I'll cut it off now these LEDs are designed to be cut every two inches or so with a little mark
That fits nicely up through where we just drilled a hole, that's good
Alright, so I think the best position is going to be for this box to be vertically up and down next to the bucket
I'm going to use some tape to secure it in place
I'm also just gonna tape this piece in place
I'm leaving a fair amount of slack in our LED line
Because I need to be able to lift the tray a little bit without it. Just immediately disconnecting everything. I've got in there
And yes in case any of you are wondering this lighting system is actually waterproof
It's not good to get any of the control box pieces wet, but that shouldn't be a problem. Let's give our lights another test
ha
Beautiful lighting right up at the bottom of our vortex chamber just how we want it to
It's beautiful
Alright, I'm gonna use a little bit more tape and just sort of secure these two power cords
So they're together and near the bottom now our fountain is looking pretty good
But we still have this bright orange
bucket and a bunch of exposed wires and cables and stuff
So we don't want that we want it to look a lot more sleek and professional on our tabletop vortex fountain we use popsicle sticks
Glued to the bottom container to make it look a little bit more classy well, that's not gonna work
So well with our bucket, but I do have an idea that will give us a similar look
These are some bamboo window blinds that I picked up at Home Depot for about $15
I think what I want to do is cut them at just the right height
So they fit right underneath this lip so they go all the way around our bucket and all of our wiring and cables it looks
like the right height
Right about here almost exactly halfway
Between top and the bottom of our blinds here now
I want to cut off the edge of this set of blinds because it's got some hardware that I'm not going to need
But before I do that
I'm just gonna add a little spot of glue everywhere so that I don't have these other lines of string unravel
Bad
We got a little bit of splintering on the back, but overall I think that worked quite nicely
All right now. I'm just gonna take our bamboo screen here. I'm gonna wrap it around
Also, I'm just going to snip a couple of these to let our cords out over on this side of the bucket
This is the IR receiver for controlling our lights, so I also just want to sort of wedge that through in a spot
So we can have it sticking out and able to receive signals from our remote control
We do have some excess bamboo, so I'm gonna seal off the strings using hot glue again, and then cut it off
There isn't any difficult
There we go, I think we have ourselves a
Fountain if you remember from the desktop vortex fountain we used a bunch of little pebbles to go around as decoration
I really liked how that looks so I'm gonna do the same thing with a little bit larger of rocks for this one
All right
I have here a power strip that has an on/off switch to it
So that we can control the pump even when it's plugged in here goes nothing
Let's get some lights going with it oh
Yeah all that looks awesome
Oh
I got leakage I didn't use glue to seal off where the lighting went down
I forgot about that remember when I said, I was gonna use hot glue and seal it off
I need to use hot glue and seal it off all that not really supposed to happen
Doesn't look like it's dripping think we're good
All right Wow with the lights off this thing looks
Incredible the LED lights at the bottom do an amazing job of just lighting up the entire fountain
There are tiny tiny little bubbles swirling through the water
And I think it does a really good job of lighting those off and it also
Reflects off of the top of the water pretty well so the whole thing looks like it's glowing
All right, let's try this again outside. I do have one more little thing that I've added to this one
I talked about how I really like the look of the tiny little bubbles mixed in with the water
Swirling around because they do a good job of catching light well just to take things another step farther
I actually added a hose going into the bottom that wraps around in a circle with some tiny little holes pricked in it
So I'm gonna add some pressure, and we'll see if we can get some larger bubbles swirling around in the mix with it
There we go now, we've got much larger bubbles swirling around in there
You can see that makes the tornado a little bit less effective as there's gaseous bubbles running around
The overall density of the fluid in the container is lower, so it has a harder time maintaining the tornado now
There's one other thing I didn't mention
These aren't oxygen bubbles they're propane
So now we have a colorful
Glowing fire vortex fountain this is one of the coolest things I've ever built look at this. It's colored and
Vortex and it's on fire. I love this thing
That looks so good
You could roast marshmallows on a fountain
What have you ever been able to roast marshmallows on a fountain before I?
Love it there. You have it guys
Not just a vortex fountain and not just a light-up vortex fountain but a light a for Tex fountain that lights on fire
This is basically the same build as our tabletop vortex fountain. It's just a lot bigger, and we added some lights and some
Propane gas to it
So you can ignite it, but it's a pretty simple build I built this whole thing in just a few hours
And it works out very well like this is something that I definitely want in my house
Maybe not with the fire all the time, but if it's an outdoor fountain then probably with it
Thanks for joining us for this project today, and we'll see you in the next one talk to you then
There it is strobe light sees your effect a little piece of leaf floating around in there. I wanna grab it
Can't spin a basketball.
