33 gallon cobbled together!

[Slick Fork]

Hey Doug,

Sorry to hear about your crash. I was browsing your "not so budget" thread and really liked the look of some of the gorg's and filter feeders you had in there. Also really liked the large leafy macro, is that Halmidea?

I don't think I'll have to narrow my fish down for quite some time, I've got some air cured live rock for the base and will have to figure out what I want to do for seed rock... I'm really hoping to avoid introducing pests. I'll probably put the tank together this week, so probably mid august before I'm ready for any kind of livestock.

[Slick Fork]

So, set it all up for a freshwater trial run in the living room to see how the noise is with all the powerheads, wavebox etc. going. Wavebox is a little noisy but it hasn't been used for a while so i've left it all running to rinse it off and hope it quites down a little... good news is CHECK OUT MY WAVE


Click for the video
Gotta paint the stand to match the furniture up here or the wife'll kill me

[The Grizz]

That is one sweet wave you have going there Chris . A little bird tells me you are thinking of putting a nice big sump and skimmer on this tank .

[Slick Fork]

Yeah, I'd like to... Unfortunately my buyer for my old lights backed out. Part of my goal with this tank is to do the setup (hardware wise) with almost no fresh money going into it. The joys of being back in school! So, we'll have to see. I'm going to call the glass place on monday to see how much an external overflow will set me back, then figure the stand and the plumbing and see what I can scrape together. It'd kind of suck to build all of this and then have no money for a few showpiece chunks of live-rock and frags!

[Doug]

Good thing you have those end pieces on there with that wave going.

[Slick Fork]

Well, it was a busy evening tonight. After a lot of back and forth and general wishy-washiness the decision has been made.... Cut the tank, comission a stand by a Master Welder, and see if the old sump is gonna leak!

So... the new plan is to cut a notch in this tank and build an external overflow which will be plumbed to the old sump from my 110. This should double my water volume and alow me to take salvaging bits to the extreme. I plan on pressing my Vertex In-180 into service as the skimmer... that should bump my bio-capacity up to about 50 fish I think... How many tangs do you think I could fit in here? In all seriousness though, I am a little concerned about overskimming and was planning on just running the skimmer 8 hours a day or so, any thoughts?

Now for some pic's to interrupt all this talking!

First off, after a couple of trial runs with the dremel and diamond bit I felt ready to tackle the tank. Here it is ready to go in the shop... Notice the super high-tech lighting system I rigged to illuminate my work!! One thing I did do which was neat was instead of having a dam to hold the water, I just pumped the water out of a 5 gallon pail and used paper towels and duct tape to channel it back into the bucket. This kept the cut clean and cool in shallow water.


This next one is just a break I took about 1/3 of the way through. It probably took me a lot longer to do then it had to but I figured easy does it for my first glass carving experience. You can see how the water is just flowing over the area to be cut, it took a little trial and error to set my drain channel up properly but only about half of the bucket ended up on the floor when it was all said and done (good thing I didn't try this in the kitchen )


Finally, the cut's all done. Roughly 8 inches in length and a little over an inch deep. Nobody will mistake this for a job done by a pro but overall I'm pretty happy with my first attempt!


So... I'm a little concerned about the stress on the back panel when I add the overflow box and was considering adding a mini eurobrace, say 1/4"thick by 1/2" x36" just to add a little beef to the back. The whole tank is 1/4" glass and that's what I have planned for the overflow, it'll be 10" wide by 4" front to back and say another 10" top to bottom with 1" bulkheads setup for a herbie. Any thoughts on the necessity of the Euro-brace?

Cheers!

[sharuq1]

Did you sell your big tank? What kind of fish are you planning on putting in this one?