Planetary Waterwheel! (Patreon)

I'd wanted to do something with flowing water for a while!  This strange looking contraption is a waterwheel composed of planetary gears driven by pumping water in through concealed channel that runs from the lower back to the top of the wheel.  You can also just spin it with your fingers :)

I had a few versions of this before I found a workable size and shape for the wheel buckets.  There were Frankensteinian hybrids made of blue tape and fragments of test prints, mostly because this is a looooong print!  It ran about 40 hours for me with fairly ordinary settings!  

But, after much experimenting, it works!

What I will say, though, is that I wish I hadn't gone with the absolute smallest water feature pump I could find!  The rotation is very much sensitive to the pressure the pump can exert, and the little one I picked up is a bit feeble.  It was the "extra-extra-small" one on offer at my hardware store :P  Check out the video that should be on Instagram shortly if you're curious how it goes!

Hey, see in that picture there are two attachment points for 8mm tubing?  One of those is for the water in, and feeds the internal channel, and the other one drains the basin at the bottom.  However, the basin can't possibly drain quickly enough through that hole, so I drilled a couple of extras into my print.  That worked much better, and so I've added another four drainage holes into the model.

What else is there to mention... well, it's print-in-place, no support required, but you'd probably worked that out already!  Herringbone planetary gears with bevels to hold everything in place - I do love those things!  A simple pin in the middle would probably have less friction, but wouldn't look nearly as cool :P

Creative Printer supporters who are crazy enough to print this will find it under Planetary Waterwheel on Dropbox :)