Asylumdown's 275 Tank build

[Delphinus]

I'm not a tank builder so I could be wrong but I thought the space between the panes of glass was more structural, and it's the corner bead that prevents leaks. The silicone to glass bond is insanely strong. I think the bubbles probably don't affect the integrity of the tank - it just doesn't look very nice.

Man, I don't know what to suggest. I understand your frustration of "please just get this fixed" but rushing things now is a mistake.

It might be worthwhile at this point to take the tank out of the equation and continue with the build after possession. This lets the housebuilders painters etc finish their job and hopefully your possession date doesn't get pushed back. Then you can also investigate the silicone bubbles further and explore relevelling options and so on. This is your tank, after this much planning and anticipation, why accept anything less than perfect?

On the other hand though, part of me says if you pay a housebuilder to build a house, it comes with the expectation that they do the job right. Even if it pushes possesion back, this is their fault, not yours. I totally sympathize, we went through a lot of similar stuff when we built our house. It's brutal how much stuff is just eyeballed instead of properly measured.

[asylumdown]

I am going to look in to the bubbles a little further, but my gut reaction is that it's not going to be a problem. To be honest I didn't notice them in person, I don't know if it was the lighting or my camera, but they look considerably more pronounced in the photos than they do in real life. Also, the silicone will all be hidden by framing, so I'm not really concerned with the aesthetics.

Had a little pow-wow with the project manager and his main site foreman today and we talked about both self leveller and the spray foam, and what would need to happen to re-do the whole tank. One way or another, there needs to be a minimum 3 inch thick sheet of plywood under the tank to anchor the doors and the cabinet framing, which will still need to be made by gluing thinner sheets together. There's no guarantee that the second attempt will come out any flatter than the first. It would be an absolute last resort option.

So that leaves us with self leveller or spray foam as a first choice. After talking about it, we ruled out the self leveller because the gap between the bottom of the tank and the plywood starts out really, really tiny, and is only really exaggerated on the one side. There's a good chance that due to air getting trapped/liquid leveller not filling all the right places, there could be large bubbles that get trapped underneath and the leveller doesn't compress at all. So we're going to try the foam route because it can be applied using a long hose, and if there are some imperfections, it's slightly compressible.

fingers crossed.