Gem City Rock and Mineral Society

Member,

American Federation of
Mineralogical Societies

GEM CITY ROCK and MINERAL SOCIETY

Member,

Eastern Federation of
Mineralogical and
Lapidary Societies

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Table-Top Fountain Project

Sample Fountains:
Slate Fountain	Small Rotating Sphere	Large (Almost) Rotating Sphere	Quartz Varieties Fountain

Building Fountains: Putting it All Together

My fountains are only a small sample of the types of things that are possible. If you spend any time at all on the Internet, you will find tons of pictures of fountains for sale, and all of them are good inspiration for your own fountain(s) – even though we will mostly be focusing on fountains that feature rocks or minerals prominently. If you are planning to make a fountain (or 2 or 6), please do spend a bit of time looking either at photos on the web, or looking at the books from your local library. It may also take a while to collect the parts for your fountain, so start collecting now. The basic things you need are:

a basin to hold the water and submerge the pump in – so it needs to be deep enough to cover the pump, and large enough to hold your fountainhead and/ or other design elements, but you want to keep it relatively small; needs to be waterproof, or waterproof-able with a sealant;
A pump large and powerful enough to lift the amount of water you want, to the height you want, and / or do the work you want it to do – like spin a sphere, or turn a wheel, or whatever;
A housing to cover and / or protect the pump from the weight of the fountainhead and filler;
A fountainhead, or something from which your water will emerge – can be a copper or bamboo pipe, a drilled rock, an opening in a pile of rocks, whatever; generally this is your major design element, but it doesn’t have to be;
Filler to cover / hide / disguise the pump and its housing – can be tumbled stones, gravel, marble chips, whatever – and you’d be surprised at how much of this you may need.

Here are some photos to help you see how my fountains went together.

Tumbled Quartz Fountain:

Quite a lot of stuff to fill up a 10” diam. By 3.5” deep bowl!	Pump taped in place (using the new ‘clear’ duct tape).


Since the tumbled stones were getting pretty expensive, I cheated and filled up some space in the middle with glass marbles, with some craft mirror tiles on the bottom to try to reflect more light back up since the light that came with the pump was pretty under-whelming; then put in the large chunks of rose quartz, filling in around with the tumbled stones.	When there’s enough to hold it, prop the Quartz Point over the light, and keep filling in with rough and tumbled quartz. Snip off the tubing from the pump to just below the level of the filler, and hide the tube – I moved a couple of tumbled stones away so you can see where it is.

Slate Tiers Fountain:

This one is in a deep-ish 11” diam. plate, and the pump’s tubing and the light are fed into a length of 1” clear aquarium tubing, which the bottom two slate tiers will slide over and hide. The pump’s PVC tubing is just enough longer to fit into the smaller hole drilled in the top tier.	Before putting the assembled tiers onto the fountain, the pump cover (1.5” section of PVC drain pipe, painted black and drilled to let water in and cords feed out) is placed over the pump, and marble chips (from a half-cubic-yard bag of landscape gravel – lots left over for other fountains!) are filled in around the outside.


The tiers are assembled with sections of clear acrylic rod hot-glued between them. The crystals are held on with sticky wax, made to hold candles upright in their holders. The two small slate chips on top hold the top crystal off the top tier so the water can emerge below it to run over the tier.	The tier assembly slides down over the aquarium tubing, the smaller PVC tubing is fed into the hole in the top tier, and the whole assembly rests on the 4” PVC ring, keeping the weight off the pump.

Small Spinning Sphere Fountain:

A plastic plant saucer, painted black, is the basin; so as not to use too much filler, the filler base is raised to the top of the pump with a plastic grid cut from a 2’x4’ piece of fluorescent-light-cover (lots left over for other fountains!), with uprights from the edge trimmings, and the pump tubing is fed up through.	Since the gravel is so small, the ½” grid is covered with plastic canvas so the chips won’t fall through. Then the sphere base is connected to the pump’s output PVC.


The sphere base is made from 1-½” PVC painted black, PVC cap, a circle of acrylic sheet left over from a window-glazing project, and a beveled-ring sphere-holder.	When assembled, the idea was that the beveled ring would be sealed to the acrylic circle, and would hold the water the pump pumped out; the pump tubing would pass through the black section, but be sealed off from it, so the bottom part would remain dry; that’s where the lighting unit is.	Sealing the acrylic circle to the ring with plastic cement was fine; sealing the tubing with silicone caulk was less fine, probably because I didn’t give it enough time to cure, hense moisture inside on the lighting unit (ouch). Hot glue around the wiring, which also had to come out through the side, was okay as long as it wasn’t pulled around too much.