Heron's Fountain

thingiverse

This is a fully printable and working Heron's fountain, which does not require a pump or similar device. See Wikipedia for a detailed description of how it works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heron's_fountain **Please note that this is not an easy print, as it needs to be water-tight and air-tight as much as possible! You and your printer must be able to produce high-quality prints or you will waste a lot of time with a non-functional fountain. One single gap can ruin the whole thing!** #### Short story When I got my 3D printer, one of the first things I designed and printed on it was a Heron's fountain. It was not comparable to this one now; it was about the size of one single tank from the current model, and due to my lack of knowledge about fine prints, it would only run for 1-2 seconds with a 2mm high fountain. It was a complete failure. But I love printing functional things, and some days ago I stumbled upon [DKoss Heron's Fountain](https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2104730). This reminded me of my initial fail of a cool thing, and I thought about printing this one. However, 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 everything in one object: If something goes wrong, you will not see it, have no option to repair it, and material and time are wasted. - Has as few access holes as possible. Each opening to fill or drain the water will add some possible leakage. - Looks good enough to stand 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 get it done, you should now own a Heron's fountain which runs for over 2 minutes with a quite high fountain using 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