Mirage Construction

This past week or so I've been consumed in building this thing... here's a little update as to how everything is coming together:

Here are two images of the top of the mirage. It's a container completely built with 3/8" Acrylite (basically Plexiglas, just a different company). It's two by three feet, with 6 inch tall sides. The joints are (hopefully) waterproof, and the main sheet of Acrylite has 128 holes laser cut into it. Here's a closeup of the holes:

The sooty black marks, I think, are burn marks from the laser cutter. Cool, no?

The plan is that this structure will be elevated by these four booms:

*Sorry about the image quality there - this photo was taken in the poor lighting conditions of my basement, so I had to Photoshop it the best I could. What you're looking at is four clear tubes being glued down to circles of Acrylite. The chairs and metal rods taped to the Acrylite rods are there to keep everything in place while the glue dries. Here's a closeup image:

And what's the plan for the falling water? I was going to build another Acrylite structure to catch all the water falling through those holes, but that turned out to be way too expensive. So, instead of hours of work on needlessly gluing and waterproofing expensive plexi, I swung by Target and bought myself a kiddie pool:

Word... Word... When I was blowing this thing up in my living room, I realized that this is a hazardously large amount of water. I had planned on doing all this in the studio on the second floor, but imagine the mess this thing would cause if it started leaking. This is why operations have moved to the basement. I think it's a true mark of geekdom when your work forces you to work in the basement.

The water pump is in the mail, and should be arriving soon. It is a Fountain Tech FT-1300 from Fountain Mountain. I need a few more pieces of plastic from Canal Plastics to mount the top piece to the legs. Apart from that, I'm ready to roll.