Spinning Water Sculpture

This Instructable shows you how to make a spinning water sculpture.

My motor was working with just one 1.5 V battery. However, you might need two 1.5 V batteries for your 3 V motor because there are many types of motors out there.

Parts: 3 V motor, 1.5 V battery - 2, blue tack or plasticine, masking tape, packing foam or wood, 2 mm metal wire, insulated wires, old high power wire, plastic propeller or piece of cardboard/thin packaging material.

Tools: pliers, scissors.

Optional parts: 1.5 V AA battery harness (might not work with AAA batteries), 1 mm metal wire, rubber bands.

Optional tools: wire stripper.

It's easy to make a mess in your room when working with packing foam. I used masking tape to keep the packaging foam in one piece.

I repeated the procedure for the wings.

I attached the wings with metal wire because masking tape falls apart in the water. Even plumbing/water tape might eventually lose stickiness.

You might not need this step if your propeller fits motor rotor. However, some propellers have very big holes and some motor rotors are very thin. Thus you will need to remove the insulation of high power wire and insert it into a motor with pliers as shown in the photo. Another advantage of using a high power wire insulation is that you might not need to order a propeller online. You can just make a propeller from a piece of cardboard.

Click on this link:

https://www.instructables.com/id/Water-Boat-1/

You can see that the boat is very fast with the plastic propeller. However, the boat was a lot slower with recycled propeller.

After finishing the first design I decided to find out what would happen if I add two more motors.

You will need to make two more propellers (one is in the photo).

The battery was slightly discharged. I later charged the battery to find that the sculpture was not so much spinning in circles but mostly moving around the sink. This is because each of the three motors did not have equal trust output. Probably I should purchase two more exactly similar propellers because I only had one propeller. There was also a lack of weight balance. The boat trust and weight balance inequality was a minor issue with the first design and became a major problem in the second design.