Heron's Fountain by Sebastian_v650

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

This is a fully printable and working Heron's fountain, which is a fountain which isn't requiring a pump or something simmilar. See Wikipedia for a detailed description how it works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heron's_fountain
Please note: This is not an easy print as it has to be water tight and even air tight as much as possible! You and your printer have to be able to produce high quality prints or you will end up wasting a lot of time with a non-functional fountain. One single gap will ruin the whole thing!
Short story
When I got my 3D printer, one of the very first things I designed and printed on it was a Heron's fountain. It was not comparable with this one now, it was about the size of one single tank from the current model and due to my not existing knowledge about the fine print things, it would only run for 1-2s with a 2mm "high" fountain.
It was a completely fail.
But I love printing functional things, and some days ago I stumbled about DKoss Heron's Fountain. This remembered me about my initial fail of a cool thing, and I thought about printing this one.
But after studying his design (which is not bad at all!) and with my experience in mind, I decided to create an own fountain design which should:
Not print all in one object: If something goes wrong, you will not see it, have no option to repair it and material and time is wasted.
Has as few access holes as possible. Each opening to fill / drain the water will add some possible leakage.
Looks good enough to have it standing around on the table.
Is easy to fill and drain again.
So I fired up Fusion 360 and ended up with this model of a Heron's fountain!
Printing and running the fountain
Please read the instructions below carefully before starting the print.
If you got it done, you should now own a Heron's fountain which runs for over 2 minutes with a quite high fountain with the default 1.5mm nozzle. You can also try other nozzle diameters and see how it changes runtime.
Here is a video of it running: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZctH1mX9gaI