Hi Everyone, here is my second project. This one was a little more complicated than the work shed. Again the goal was to keep me busy during the rainy season and to build as much from scratch at the lowest possible cost. Pretty much everything was built from junk I already had. The tower is smaller in diameter than some that I have seen on the web but looks pretty good next to the running stock I have. This project is not totally completed yet. I still need to build something to lower and raise the water spout and maybe a few other touches such as a entry hatch on the roof. I used the same used fence board wood on the tank as I used to build the work shed in my first post. I used a coffee can as a form and glued the wood slats on to the can. The coffee can had a little different aspect ratio than most coffee cans. It was slightly smaller and shorter than normal can that holds 2-1/2 lbs. I then build a roof rafter structure out of strips of wood. The shingles were made by taking another redwood fence board and cross-cutting it into strips. I then used a knife along with a small hammer to split off shingles from the strips. Using this method I would say that less than 50% of the shingles came out ok and the rest were scrap. The copper bands were made out of some house wire I had that I had stripped the insulation off of. I know that the wire size does not really look to scale. I also didn’t like the way the connection points looked so I cut up a tin can and made some little square tubes that I put over the connection points.
The tower structure was also made from the same fence board that I cut up except that it was from the interior of the board so that there were no weathered surfaces. After I built the tower structure I wanted to darken it so I used some dark Minwax stain. That was where things started to go wrong. I used hot melt glue to assemble everything. The next day after I had stained the structure it started to come apart. It appeared as if the stain was attacking the glue joints. I don’t know if the stain actually attacked the glue or if it just got between the glue and the wood since it was an oil based stain. I should have used a water based stain. I thought I was going to have to start over on the structure but didn’t like that idea. I decided to see if I could pin the structure together. My wife had some pins used for sewing so I got a few from her to try out my idea. I cut the length of the pins down to about 1/2 inch and drove a few in. It worked pretty well so the next day I went over to Walmart and bought a box of pins (about $2). I really liked the way the pins look because it looks like the wood is spiked together and the scale was about right.
The water spout is made from some copper tubing I had. The end is 1/4" soldered into 3/8 tube. I then used a file to taper the 3/8" tube down to the 1/4" tube. I does not look totally realistic but it does look like a spout. I then made a bracket out of a couple pieces of the tin can I had cut up. Once I had cut and formed the bracket to the right shape, I soldered it onto the spout and then used pins to spike into the wood structure to act as the hinge point. I still need to make the mechanism to raise and lower the spout. I want to use chain like way you see holding up the spout. I made the chain out of the center conductor of copper coax cable I had. I took the copper wire and wrapped it around a length of coat hanger wire to form a coil of wire. I then cut the coil into individual loops and started hooking them together. After each loop was attached I would crimp it so that it looked more like oval chain loops. I will need to make more to complete the project. After completing the tank and tower structure I was not satisfied with the way it looked so I decided to add a water level gauge and a pump house. The same technique was used to build the pump house structure as the work shed in my first post. I placed a quarter next to the pump house to give a sense of size.
I was able to make the singles on the pump house thinner than the ones on the water tank roof because the wood had dried out some since I started the project. Originally when I started the wood was wet from being outside in the rain. I added a door and made hinges out of the same tin can I had cut up and used finish head brads as hinge pins. I cut the brads to length with a pair of wire cutters so that they did not stick out the bottom of the hinge and just look like a nail. I then added a piece of aluminum ground wire to look like a pipe going up to the top of the tank. The pipe is held to the tank with metal brackets made from tin can strips. I also added flashing around the pipe entry point into the pump house. This was made out of annealed soda can aluminum. The door handle was just made out of a piece of copper wire. The same wire as I used of the tank bands.
After the pump house was built I found that it really needed to be attached to the tower structure so I built a platform to set it on and I attached that to the tower structure. Oh, one other thing. When I built the pump house I forgot to build a floor in it so I had to install the boards for the floor through the door way. Next time I will know better. Well I hope you like the way it is turning out. I know that I went into quite a bit of detail on how the project was built and I hope I did not bore you to death. Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Mike
