Red Deer Water Tower

I lived for many years as a child in the city of Red Deer, in central Alberta. One of the more interesting structures there (which I actually don't remember much) is the water tower. It is 132 feet tall (about 15 stories) and 62 feet in diameter. It holds 500,000 Imperial gallons of water. A discussion with a LEGO friend a couple of weeks ago brought it to mind, and I decided to build it.

A description of the water tower and its history can be seen in this PDF file.

I had a lot of sand-green brick and plate from a bunch of Yoda figure sets that we had bought cheap (the same sets that got us into building the Alberta Legislature). Still, I had to borrow sand-green brick from that friend, and emptied quite a few of my parts bags on this project. My estimate is that this project took nearly 10,000 pieces to build.

The lower cone is just a bunch of stacked circles. The pattern for the circles was produced by a program that another friend, Don, did to help us build the dome on the legislature. For those, I just used the first image, of the bottom layer of a dome. The central cylinder was done similarly, but needed some "kludging" to make it work out with the studs-on-side plates. The final cylinder here is actually the third I built. The first one was too narrow, the second one was too fat, but this third one is just right. :-)

The top sphere is the largest object produced with the help of the dome program. It took a huge amount of pieces and a lot of time to build. It is 48 studs across, and almost as high. That makes the top half of it noticeably larger than the dome on the legislature. The bottom half was built by simply reversing the sense of the images produced by the dome program.

When I was nearly half done the sphere, and realized how much work it was going to be (and how heavy it was going to be!), I recalled the sphere that James had done. He used a Technic interior structure to hold together 6(?) pieces, which were all built studs-up, but fastened together so that the studs actually faced all 6 directions.

The real thing

The first study of the cylinder on top of the cone - you should be able to see the kludge here

Looks OK to me

Look carefully (that's my shirt that you can see at the bottom of the picture)

Look carefully

Early stages of the spherical tank

Looking down

Looks a bit like a fruit bowl

Upside down

Later stages of the tank

Now it's a wine goblet!

This late level worked out quite well

The final assembly

Looking from below

James' sphere