How To Build A Talladega Nights Inspired Six Cheese Fountain

Step 8 How Will We Heat The Cheese?

Another hurdle we had to leap was the pesky "How ya gonna heat the cheese?" question. You should have seen the first plan! It involved lots on copper tubing and a steam wallpaper stripper. But cooler (literally) heads prevailed. Enter the Engineers: Seth and Josh. Ok, so Seth isn't actually a full-fledged Engineer, but he did finish one year of Engineering at NC State and he also slept at a Holiday Inn Express, so it counts. Anyway, Seth and his Engineer friend Josh hit upon a two stage plan:

1.) Heat the cheese apart from the fountain then add it to the fountain. Sounds reasonable. We need to mix the hot stuff into the cheese anyway so we might as well mix it, heat it, then add it. Great, but what happens once we remove it from the heat?

2.) Along with the cheese we heat several bricks which will go into the base of each of the six cheese pumps. To make this plan even more effective and to help cut back on cheese we'll break a few bricks and double wrap them in aluminum foil, then after heating we'll add them to the cheese receptacles themselves. This will raise the cheese level, which will insure that the cheese level will rise above the inlets at the base of each pump. Brilliant!

So where did said "hot brick" come from? You'll notice in the beginning of the video below a large upright oven which is used by caterers for warming stuff being rolled into place. It just so happened that one of these sweet things was waiting for us in the reception hall, otherwise we would have had to heat the cheese and bricks in a kitchen which was located in a separate building.

Now the last problem...

My father, another Engineer, pointed out that if someone had hired us to design a "cheese cooler", with the exception of the hot bricks our design would have remained mostly unchanged. Move the hot cheese vertically up a PVC pipe, then allow it to cascade down across two inclined sheet metal shelves. It was only a matter of time before our cheese would begin to thicken and become unpumpable. (It's a word. Trust me.) This made thinning the cheese sauce a critical step and at the final moment we decided to ad a small ceramic heater deep within the fountain to preheat the parts prior to adding the cheese. You'll notice in the final video that the fountain was unveiled just before we add the cheese and move the pumps into place. The plastic covering was actually there more to trap heat than to hide the fountain.

For this step we used a Square Drive (AKA Robertson) Screw Driver.

Don't miss the VIDEO of the Six Cheese Fountain in action on Step 9!