Large Rain Curtain Water Feature BuildPosted by Corbett Kay on May 19th, 2021 I recently had the opportunity to build a rain curtain water feature for a customer. This customer basically showed me some pictures of what they wanted and gave me an approximate size and then handed the keys over these types of projects. Hands down are my favorite. Our site get to flex your creative muscles, you get to do a little bit of problem solving and you don't have to worry about being micromanaged by a customer now, since i don't have the capacity to break eight foot material. I had all of this 10 gauge mild steel pre-formed by my steel supplier. I ordered three pieces at 10 by 10 by 10 open back and then i had them also cut out the filler pieces for the back. I trimmed the top corners to 45 and tack. Welded them together, we were at this point undecided on the overall height, but i knew that the customer wanted it full open wide at this stage. I'M just tack welding it together and the reason is, i didn't, want to have anything fully welded until i had a final height confirmation from the customer once it was good and tacked together, i pulled it off the workbenches and stood it upright so that the customer Could really get a visual on just how big this thing was. While i was waiting to hear back from them, i started work on the stainless tub. I also ordered this piece pre-formed from my supplier. Once i had the two end pieces of the tub welded on. I added on some stainless angle iron for rigidity and also for the fountain itself to bolt too. After that i cut in and welded on, some bungs for the various fittings that were going to be required. I should mention that my old tic torch water cooled tig torch had expired from old age, and i added a ck worldwide superflex to torch and i've been very impressed with it. This was the first project that i really got to spend significant time with it. I should mention i'm using my miller syncrowwave for this project. Once i had everything fully welded out, i gave it one last qc check and from here it's heading outside for the old water test. Now, as we get back into the actual fountain structure of this build, i want to give a big shout out to doug over at artfully road when i was given the big packet of literature from the customer and i started working through it. I came across doug's channel and his rain curtain build. I contacted him immediately with a few questions that i had and he went above and beyond to answer them all. So, if you're interested in seeing another build and looking at an actual emitter head, that's a lot more detailed than mine, then head over to doug's channel. I'M going to leave a little link up here in the corner, thanks doug, and now that the tub is outside full of water. It'S time to put the big fountain structure back up on the table turns out. The customer wants about a foot, trimmed off the bottoms and they're very happy with the width having this shop crane available for big projects. Just like this one is an absolute back saver. I did an older video on the build and i'll leave a link to it up here now. In addition to checking this thing with the square, i wanted to make sure it was also in a perfectly flat plane. It was a little unhappy with the alignment on one of the corners and i wanted to redo that the very tricky thing about a project like this is, if you twist or manipulate one part, it often has a domino effect and it affects the alignment of other Parts, so your best bet is to just make sure that everything is flat and level and then you can start working out very small discrepancies, but you can see here. I'Ve got all my clamps set up working with the square and really trying to manipulate this one corner that i was unhappy with when you only have the legs attached to anything and no attachment points at the top. It can get very tricky trying to work out any twists or any errors that you made during manufacture. Your best bet is to just invest the time now and make sure everything is perfectly aligned. You'Ve all no doubt heard the old saying start straight and straight and at this point i've located and cut the slot where the water will fall through. As you can see here, i've left three tabs and i want to heat and bend this up. My thought is that it will kind of shield the view of the inside of the box when you're standing in front of the fountain. I was also able to sell the customer on some accent lighting to illuminate the water as it cascades down, and my thought was. I could hide the lighting behind this piece. I ended up not being happy with it at all and you'll see i completely abandoned the whole thing and cut it out. Okay. So i'm working on these back filler panels on this fountain. I'Ve got all of the bracing in, and i just cut a little hole and put this hinge in here, because what i want to do is keep these top parts permanent. But there's a valve in here to adjust the water flow that i want them to be able to easily access. So i cut the square hole, put the hinge in and now i'm going to slit the rest of the panel here. This is a handy trick, especially if you're cutting a door into a blank front or sheet metal front of something. You know mount the hinge first and then separate the pieces. That way. You know you have perfect alignment and, as you can see, you can still readily grind the slag off of your edges and you have perfect alignment. If you look closely, you can see that i've added some two inch by two inch angle iron around the bases where the bolts will go through. You can also see that i've added some eighth inch by one inch flat bar across the backs of all these boxes. In about two foot increments, mainly to give some rigidity, but also to hold the back filler panels as i will remain next, i turn to the plasma cable to design and cut out the brackets that are going to hold the one and a half inch pvc pipe. That will be the emitter head. This has turned out to be quite a useful tool for my shop. The trick here was keeping the pipe high enough that when you stood in front of the fountain, you couldn't see the actual pipe, but also keeping it aligned. Well enough that the water fell through the narrow slot [ Music ]. If you look very closely at those brackets, you can see that i left little keeper tabs to prevent the pipe from falling back out again, and this was just a test head. This wasn't the final emitter head that i ended up with and i think we're ready to come off the table for the final time, and you can see here that the shop crane is working right at its height capacity. If you were considering building one, the best piece of advice i can give, you is build, it taller, build it bigger. So this is just a cut jig that i also designed on the plasma table and i'm using it to locate the four holes on the base. As well as the four holes in the bottom of the legs, and at this stage i brought the entire thing outside for final assembly and then also to do some tuning on the water system. I ended up oversizing the water pump in order to give the customer options on their water flow and, as you can see here, with the pump running wide open, the water is traveling at such a high velocity that, instead of trickling down, it's actually spraying out at An angle, so what i did at this point was just choke the water line down with a vice grip. I was still waiting on delivery of the adjustment valve and, if you listen, it sounds more like a waterfall rather than rain, and here we are adjusted down with much more natural of a look and sound. Now you can see here the automatic float valve. This will maintain a constant water level, ensuring that the pump never runs dry. This is the access door where the adjustment valve will be as soon as it comes right now, i'm just using the vice grip. Now the valve here on the end of the water head is just for flushing. The pump that i chose is rated to pump quarter inch debris, which would clog one of these water holes. Therefore, i put the valve on the end, so they could flush it out. They heard me mention doug over at artfully rogue. He puts individual nozzles into his waterheads and it makes a much more defined stream of water. I gave it one final degreasing disassembled it loaded on my trailer, and here we are at the customer's house now. This was the area that the customer had staked out for us, so all we had to do was dig the hole, drop, the tub in and install the fountain. They had water and electrical nearby that they were going to handle themselves with it all installed. You can really see the customer's vision, surrounded by beautiful plants, they're going to add some river rock boulders to the great, and it really breaks up this big stucco wall we'll be back in the near future to add the accent, lighting and hopefully, in the meantime, they Get lots of enjoyment out of it? Well, let me know what you think: i'm looking forward to hearing from everybody thanks for watching we'll definitely catch you on the next one. YouLike it? Share it! |