Custom fountain Prototype for Project

This page is public and the construction of this fountain head is a Proof of concept that may only make sense to the people viewing this page who know what the heck it's supposed to do.

This is only a prototype and a modified version of this may be used for the main project and any changes required can be either applied to this working model or to an all together new fountain head.

The ID of the Ring is about 9.25 inches. It is made of 3/8" ID nominal copper tubing. so, 1/2" OD tubing. 

It is shown here with a minimal flow just to check out how it works.

There are 7 nozzles spaced evenly around the circle and canted about 5 degrees out.

























The nozzles were taken from a lawn sprinkler and soldered into the custom ring.

This Sprinkler had 17 brass nozzles, so after making this proto-type ring, there is enough to make another left over.

The "Little Giant" pump can be seen in the back ground.
It is a 110 volt centrifugal pump that can be run in an inline fashion, meaning that even though it it submersible, it can be plumbed up to an inlet pipe and an outlet pipe, it is a very durable pump for this class.

Shown here with a ruler for perspective.

The pump is just hooked up to some bushings and hose barbs and vinyl tubing with hose clamps for the demonstration, in the main work of art, it will need to have some elbows and throttle valves to adjust the flow. In the following images the inlet hose of the pump was simply restricted using a tight hose clamp in order to determine that the height of the fountain could be adjusted.

Since starving the pump is not the best way to control flow, I think that we will want to pipe up a bypass loop with a throttle valve where the pump discharge will flow back into the pump inlet and the amount of bypass can be controlled in order to deliver the desired fountain height. Unrestricted, and with full pump flow to the fountain, it will spray 8 to 10 feet into the air. the project will only require a foot of spray or less.

The other critical aspect that this demonstrated, was that a large bore fountain header with tiny nozzles would give pretty much even flow to all nozzles regardless of their position or distance from the pump, i.e. The furthest nozzle gets as much flow as the nearest nozzle because the header acts as a trunk line.

Shown here just spraying about 4 to 5 feet high

Not wide open.

The nozzles are pressed into predrilled holes just like the factory sprinkler at close to the appropriate angle, they are fluxed and soldered and the angle of the nozzles can be adjusted by resoldering as needed.

While this prototype has only one stem feeding the ring, the exact position of the feed line can be tweaked to fit the existing project and its preplanned provisions, also since it looked like there were 4 paths for tubing to come up the side of the tuyere, "dummy" stems can be added for symmetry.












This entire mock up took less than 2 hours to build from scratch, so an on sight mock up or entire custom rebuild is definitely within reason.

The finish of the copper can be either cleaned and painted, or patina to a dark black or green, the dimensions can be made to either be raised above the simulated fire or hug the outer round fire ring, I think it was described as 8.75" OD.