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From LegoFountain

So this was an idea I had way back at Maker Faire in 2007. It got me just inspired enough to buy a pump and a couple of the Legos, and then I let the whole thing sit around in my file cabinet at work for two years.

Finally, I got off my butt and followed through with it. All-in-all, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, so I thought I’d share with you what I did in case you’re ever inspired enough to build your own…

Part 1: Making the structure

This was by far the toughest part. Although I had an image in my head as to how it would all look when it was finished, I didn’t really know how you would start creating a plastic base. Particularly given that I live in an apartment, and apartment life isn’t really condusive to power tool usage.

Luckily, when I went to Maker Faire this year, Tap Plastics (the fantastic plastic place) had a booth set up where they advertised their plastc custom-cutting services. Thanks, guys!

So step 1 required drawing out the supports that I needed. These are 16″ wide and 5″ high, with 4″ long slots cut in them to hold the base.

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I took the drawing in to Tap Plastic and, thanks to a lot of help from a guy named Edgar, in 24 hours I had this. The large rectangle  is 24 3/4″ x 10 1/8″ x 3/8″ thick plastic that he called “Komtzey”, which has a rougher surface, so it works quite well with adhesive. The bottom portions are 1″ thick HDPE, which is the plastic they use in cutting boards.

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Putting ‘em all together got me this. Cool, huh?

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In case you’re wondering why I didn’t make the base out of Legos, too, it’s mostly because I looked up how much it would cost to order enough Legos to make make something of that size and it was really expensive. Also, I wasn’t quite sure how sturdy it would be.

Part 2: Adding the Lego base

The next step was gluing on some green Lego bases to the big rectangle. I had this glue leftover from when I fixed the light in our kitchen. It’s super strong, and waterproof, which is nice.

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These are the bases I used.

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The glue is one of those dealies where you gotta mix the 2 parts together. Like I said, it’s amazingly strong, but you don’t get much of it, and a lot of the glue got “lost” behind the little divots in the Lego bases. If I were to do it again, I’d probably get twice as much glue, or use a glue that gives you a little more in the quantity department. Still, it’s been holding up so far…

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These are the Lego bases glued on to the white plastic. And yes, it’s a good thing I was working outside — those fumes are strong!

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They found it important to tell you that bricks were not included with the thin plastic base. Just in case you weren’t familiar with the law of conservation of mass.

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Part 3: Making it a Fountain

This is the pump I used. It comes with a light (ooooh) and a nifty little flow control, just in case the water came out too strong. As it turns out, maximum power was just the right amount.

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Here’s some tubing I picked up from the local hardware store.

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I taped the tubing to the back of the base like this using some water-resistant duct tape. I cut it a little long and gave it a curvy path just in case I needed more tubing. As it turns out, I did…

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I needed to make the end of the tube come in at a little more of a right angle so that the water flowed out just right, so I’m glad I had cut it long. (In fact, I ended up cutting it a little too long — the pump didn’t quite have enough oomph to get the water all the way up the curvy tube, so I cut some off at the bottom and straightened it out a little bit.)

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Part 4: Adding Legos!

This was version 1 of the path I tried to make for the water with the Legos. Turns out this was a little too fine and intricate. Some water went down the path, but there was enough splashing and dripping that you couldn’t really tell

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So this is version 2. This worked a whole lot better. The whole thing is sitting in just a bin I picked up from The Container Store.

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I don’t know if you can tell by the side view, but I played a little with dimensionality — the water flows out from the base a little bit near the top there.

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And here’s the entire thing in motion! I’m still getting some dripping here and there (Legos aren’t water-tight, after all), but the thing actually works.

Like I said, I’m pretty happy with how it all turned out. I’m not entirely sure this is of a scope or quality to impress the Maker Faire crowd, however. I think I’d probably want to make the entire structure a whole lot bigger, and custom order some Lego sets that would let me do fun things like add waterwheels and see-saws and stuff, and all of that probably involves a larger investment of time, money, and free space in our kitchen than I’m willing to commit to at this point. But if any of you get inspired to make a Lego fountain of your own, let me know! I’d love to hear about it.

This entry was posted Monday, June 15th, 2009 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.