Perform Miracles with the Water-to-Wine Cooler

Food & Beverage Technology
Perform Miracles with the Water-to-Wine Cooler

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This brilliant (albeit sacrilegious) project comes to us from Robert Kaye and Pierre Michael of Party Robotics. I’ll let them give you the background on it:

Our longhaired friend Greg was planning a Jesus-themed birthday party, and people joked about a cool possible prop: a machine that would seemingly convert water to wine. “Hey!” we thought. “We can do that!”

So we got to work, while the others just dreamed. A week before the party, we obtained a ceramic-crock water dispenser, sprinkler valves, aquarium pumps, and assorted PVC fittings. We made a glorious mess nearly every time we tried to create the illusion, because we would inadvertently start a siphon that we couldn’t stop.

The team eventually got their first version working for the party, but the illusion wasn’t perfectly seamless. “The wine container sat on a shelf behind the cooler while the guts of the system sat on the floor—all of it draped with sheets, making it obvious that some shenanigans were taking place,” said Pierre. They endeavored to improve the Water-to-Wine Cooler and eventually came up with a version they were happy with, demonstrated in the video below:

YouTube player

If you’re curious how they pulled off this illusion, check out the full step-by-step tutorial on Make: Projects or keep an eye out for MAKE Volume 34, where the Water-to-Wine Cooler project will be excerpted.

 

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8 thoughts on “Perform Miracles with the Water-to-Wine Cooler

  1. Scott Armstrong says:

    Wish we had one of those at work.

  2. kai says:

    Very clever, ditto on the workplace version.

  3. Stan Richards says:

    Pretty cool, would bring a whole new meaning to “watercooler moment”!

  4. ka1axy says:

    Ahhh!
    Benedict’s new sales job?

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Matt Richardson is a San Francisco-based creative technologist and Contributing Editor at MAKE. He’s the co-author of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi and the author of Getting Started with BeagleBone.

View more articles by Matt Richardson

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