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Found a good use for those round coke bottles that everyone was selling at Christmas. WM reduced the price to 50cents ea. Take off the wrapper, paint them whatever color you need & turn them upside down in a pc. of PVC pipe.
1&1/4 w/the threads left on the bottle & if you cut the threads off it will fit a 1" PVC pipe. Try to get schedule 20(irrigation pipe) & wa-la; a Water Tower.
You can add a door at the bottom of the pipe. If you run a wire up the center you can mount a blinking beacon in the recessed part on the bottom of the bottle. They are thin plastic.
I started it today. My wife handed it to me & said, "I'm sure you can find a use for this on your layout".
Another thing that makes a nice water tower is 2 funnels glued together at the wide part. Then cut off the small ends. Put a plug in the top 1 & put it on a 1" PVC pipe.
Here's the Funnel Tower. If you can find funnels w/out the lip around the big part it would look better. You can get 5 diff. sized funnels in a pak at Dollar Tree. Takes 2 paks.
Here's the water tower. The 1st one is unpainted & the 2nd one is painted gloss white. This whole project took about an hour to make. I used a pc. of 3/4" PVC.
Jim, You can't see it in the picture, but, right in the middle of the ball is a very small flat spot that us MRR'er's use to put a decal w/our favorite RR or town name. It's about 1/2" high & goes all the way around. Must be a mold line for the bottle.
Larry - You got me sorry I bought the Walter's tower and that I didn't buy any of those silly Coke bottles. Nice work, very creative thinking on your part. I do have a 3 inch high plastic booze bottle I've been going to make into a water tank, just haven't got there yet.
Downstate (In Illinios that means anywhere outside Chicago metro area) there is a water tower along Route 66 that has been landmarked and its a giant catsup bottle!
That would be an easy project.
