Custom Decorations - Underwater Gas Well

[majolo]

Nah, it was just a thought.

[BillyZ]

Find a hobby store. There you will find a wide selection of raw building materials in wood, metal and plastic. Obviously i would go with plastic

For your "christmas tree" it actually seems pretty easy. work with several different diameter rods and piece them all together to for that structure. For detailing I've seen people use pin-heads glue to the surface to simulate bolts/rivets. But I wouldn't focus too much on fine detail, as you will eventually get algae growth on all the joints and cracks so fine detail might be obscured.

As somone else suggested the plastic/pvc sheets will give you a good base to build on, and for your various tanks just look around the house. I'll bet you can find any number of plastic bottles, pill bottles, etc that would work well. You can even look at the grocery store and find something cheap that has the right shape, even little candy containers sometimes have the right shape you're looking for, and you get some candy!

hth, please take lots of pics! This will be great to see being built.

[edit]doh, I missed the part where you already thought of building the tree with several diff diameter rods . But you should be able to shop around the hobby store and find all sorts of odds and ends to can use, or even take apart and use just parts for details. Find a cheap model train tanker, and pop the valve wheels off of those and glue them onto your tree. basicaly, give yourself lots of time at the hobby store and i'm sure you'll come away with a few ideas[/edit]

[Sicklid]

Yep, PVC comes in different thicknesses, what I would do is get yourself a sheet of quarter inch in black (it comes 4' x 8' like plywood... for what a sheet costs, you are going to have WAY more than you need). I would punch out disks of it in various diameters with a hammer and various sized pipes as your die and glue layers of them together to make your christmas tree. You can also use a hole saw if the size allows. You can carve the details with an exacto knife, the stuff is like dense styrofoam and cuts so easily. As I said, it can be glued with clear PVC cement which is inert once it all dries...

[leoslizards]

Originally Posted by majolo

I just had a funny thought -- it would be neat if you could incorporate the regular tank equipment in the decorations. Like have the heater as part of one decoration, and have the filter intake as part of another...

That's an interesting idea.

[QTOFFER]

I wonder if you could make a oil well like this connected to an air pump that would make it move? That would be neat!

[BillyZ]

hmmm, that would look pretty neat. And i think with some creative engineering it could certainly be done. The first challenge would be to find a plastic model of one of those pumps the right scale. Then run some airline into the frame to fill either the head of the pump or the rotating bits in the back... or both alternately, to get the motion you want.