[Canadian]

I ended up drilling 4 holes over the weekend. All went well and was relatively uneventful (although my hole in the sump could have been better). I'll have to wet test my bulkhead connections when I pick up the tank this week. I was originally thinking the gasket should always go on the water side but the more I looked into it I found the recommendation was that the gasket should always go on the flange side regardless of whether or not the nut is on the water or dry side.

I also siliconed my external overflow together and afterwards realized that I was using an expired tube of GE RTV black adhesive (the black silicone Seastar/H2O uses on their tanks). The other thing I did was fail to buff the edges of the glass (if that makes sense without a picture . . .). Normally when you look at a tank constructed with black silicone all you see is a 1/2" black seam but you shouldn't actually see the butted-up glass edge through the silicone. So now I'm considering cutting it apart to buff the edges to ensure that I have an appropriate seam because I don't know if I'll ever sleep well worrying that the external overflow I made might either leak or fall apart/blow out due to poor construction on my part or the use of expired silicone.