Crystal Fountain - aka Kugel Fountain

A Kugel Fountain, also known as a Spinning Ball Fountain are found in finer gardens or in front of Museums and Art buildings. These fountains are large and have a very heavy sphere suspended on a thin layer of water so that it can be spun by most anyone, they are a very cool effect.

I have taken that same idea and shrunk it down to use a standard sized billiard ball as the sphere. To be honest, I first ed a model from the internet but it never worked for me, so I started from scratch and designed my own version. After a fair amount of trial and error I got it to work reliably, this is the model for now.

The water is provided by a small aquarium water pump, these are readily available on the internet but I would recommend a pump of at least 5W (95G/Hr). I got mine at Amazon (https://a.co/d/bJccQ2B). The tolerance for the tube between the model and the pump are tight, there may be a variance due to filament type and moisture content, I have done my best to get a tight fit but some silicon or sanding may be needed to get a good fit. If too much water comes out from around the sphere you may want to adjust the intake lever on the filter portion of the pump, all the models I tried has this feature on them.

The water is inserted into the model and the stream is immediately directed to go in a circular direction. This causes the sphere to spin nicely, the inside is smoothed as much as possible so as not to impede the flow of water. A word of note, the sphere spin is sensitive to being level, if too much off level it will not spin. if it is leaning too much to one side it may have more water come out that side of the sphere, as you see in my video. To get the right effect some leveling of the model may be needed, try to stay level.

There is a Drain Plate underneath the rocks of the fountain in the video, nothing special it is meant to fit in a bowl and hold the rocks while allowing the water to drain through. whatever bowl you use you may have to adjust the size of this plate so that it fits it. To help with the leveling I made some "feet" to fit in the holes on the plate, 3 or 4 feet will do the trick, to hold it level and bit steadier, if you use the drain plate you will have to modify the Tower Tube for whatever length you need. This can be done easily in TinkerCAD or any STL editor program. I have included the Solid Works file for the Tower Tube to adjust dimensions as needed.

I had fun making this fountain, it was a challenge at times but I love tinkering, deg, and engineering. That said, this is just my first release, there will be other versions coming out, they are already in the works.

I used the standard settings on my Bambu Labs A1 to print all my models and that work well. When you print it out there may be a seam that traverses the model vertically, this can be smoothed out by a fine grit sandpaper although I have found it was not necessary on my models.

There are nozzles that come with the pumps I ordered, I use the smaller sized nozzle with a vinyl tube around it for a better seal. I'm not sure this is necessary for operation but I didn't like two hard surfaces ing together for water flow. The tube I used has an OD of 10mm, ID of 7mm, and a wall thickness of 1.5mm. I used my calipers to get those measurements so that is the number do not exactly add up.This model uses this setup with the printed tube.

The sphere in the video is the same size as a billiard ball but I thought it looked nicer. I also got this from Amazon, it is 60mm in diameter. The video is of a display I built for a vendor to sell rock spheres and such, the crystals and rocks with lights underneath are for effect only.