If, on the other hand, you're not getting good spread on the bottom of the bottles, simply pinching the ends a bit with a pair of pliers should work too.
Pinched the ends, and as you can see, the results are much more encouraging! Now when I put a bottle on it, it does cover all the sides. I am officially in business with this thing now! I have about 50 bottles that have been sitting in oxyclean for over a month because we just didn't want to have to do the actual work of cleaning. We will be using this soon to bottle that pumpkin ale we brewed back in october... Ya, kinda late, but it should be good next year... I have kegged a couple beers since then, but just haven't had the motivation to bottle. Looks like that's going to change.
I attached some pictures of it in action, including use in combo with my cheap beer crates I mentioned earlier. The summary of changes I made to the original design:
1)Used a T connector in place of corner piece for the hose connection, instead of a cross piece (only because Lowes did not have any cross pieces)
2)I used a copper with larger ID, and crimped the ends. (still 1/4" OD)
3)Reduced the total number of spigots to 24, which match up to my "custom" 24 bottle crates I already have.
4)I put the washer on TOP of the crate and flip the crate.
5) My hookup is a 3ft 5/8 hose with standard garden hose attachment on the pump end, and the other end jammed over a section of 1/2" CPVC (took some hot water to make it happen) which fits into the T section.
6) I used NO PVC glue or JB Weld to hold anything together.
In case I haven't said it yet, Thanks for the build MalFet! It will be nice to see some other people's versions, and see what type of results others are getting. I am going to get a garden hose adapter for my old pump, and I suspect it will work as well.
One last think I didn't mention: I have good water pressure at my house. When I hook this up to the hose I get very similar performance to being hooked up to the pump. So I can easily rinse with fresh water this way!
-micah