A Fish Tower

I was idly surfing the web one day, when I ran across Kirby Palm's Fishie Hi-Rise. He has a big laboratory beaker upended in his koi pond, sticking up from the surface so the koi can swim up into the beaker, above the surface of the pond. Difficult to explain, but easily understood once you see the pictures on his web page.

So we tried making one from a goldfish bowl, to go in the 50 gallon koi pond outside. Worked pretty well, but we just had the bowl propped up on a couple bricks. Finally it slipped off and broke.


So we got a glass candle cover, to try again. But this time we figured we build a real stand. Rob was over, and he said he was pretty good with a cutting torch, so we gave him the first part. First he had to get the torch working.


Then he got to cutting. We were using a piece of 4" (about) thin-wall pipe. It would stick up from the bottom of the pond, to just below the surface, and hold the glass. We needed to cut holes in the pipe to let the fish get into it. That was Rob's job.


Now I had to make some fingers from a piece of angle iron, and grind them smooth.


It was time to weld the pipe to the base. You can see the cuts at the top so the fish can swim into the pipe, and up into the glass. The holes at the bottom were Rob's contribution. He said they would help warm water circulate through the pipe by convection. There's no shots of me welding on the fingers, but that was the last thing to do before trying it out.


Now it was time to stick it in the water. We had broken the glass while fooling around with it, so we used another fishbowl as a temporary solution. It worked pretty well. We got more glass, but I don't have a picture of the tower on there yet.