Daplatapus's upgrade

[daplatapus]

From there, a few cuts here, and a few cuts there, and we have a piece of glass:





The start of the cut and end were a bit rougher than I liked so I just took a regular 1/2" drum sanding thingy for my Dremel and watered the glass down a bit and sanded the tiny rough bits off. This was the result:





But here is where things started to go awry
Just when I was feeling all proud of myself for making it this far and not have to go buy a bunch of glass to re-build the tank, I grabbed a bunch of rags to sop all the water up from inside the tank and wipe the glass down. Guess what?
Did you know that when there no glass to support that trim it's really brittle
So needless to say you really shouldn't lean on it. Argh. Yup, SNAP! Du'oh!!!!!





Not sure what I should do now. Build a brace that goes over on this side? Glue an ABS sheet 24" long 2"-3" wide right on top?
Pull all the bracing off and Eurobrace with glass? For some reason this option scares me a bit.
I don't know. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Anyway when you stand back and look at it, it looks good

[lastlight]

that cut turned out great. i'm pretty sure they say one piece trims offer some strength while the frames that are 4 pieces glued together offer none. but i highly doubt that trim did much of anything before. you should be fine but maybe smarter people can chime in.

[ScubaSteve]

I haven't crunched the numbers to prove it but a decade and half of engineering tells me that ABS did a whole lotta dimp for structure other than hiding someone doing a sloppy job in finishing the edges of the glass and cleaning up excess silicone. My vote would have been to remove the trim anyways. Go modern, go rimless.

[daplatapus]

Ok, so I'm re-visiting the idea of eurobracing this tank. I cleaned off the piece I removed and it's totally polished.





So I'm thinking this tank is a good candidate for glass euro bracing. I've looked a fair bit on line and I can't find any kind of calculator for figuring out how wide the bracing should be. My gut's telling me 3" or so.
Then while I'm searching for this, I run into the different ways to do euro bracing. Run the front and back strips inside the tank and the 2 sides and 2 centre braces on top. Or run the front and back on top of the tank, the 2 ends in-between the front and back and the centre braces on top of the front and back braces.
Argh, why can't anything be simple, lol.
So, for those of you who have 210's or similar 72" X24" tanks, what size is your bracing and where do they sit on your tanks? Pics are welcome too.

[denny_CC]

pm'd with a much better price then that lol :P

[daplatapus]

Lol, ya. When I saw the quote I nearly fell over. First of all they would only sell me tempered. Not sure if that was accurate or not. So I got them to quote both tempered and float. I didn't know exactly what sizes I needed but for rough pricing I got them to quote the following sizes:
All pieces were 12mm glass
2 - 72" X 3"
4 - 24" X 3"
1 - 22 1/2" X 16"
2 - 16" X 8"
1 - 22 1/2" X 8 1/2"
2 - 12" X 4" (for patching the internal overflows)
For untempered that was $781.44 before tax
Tempered was $921.35 before tax.

All pieces had polished edges.

[daplatapus]

Hey Lockrookie, was there somewhere you got your euro brace measurements from? I'd just like a bit of confirmation on sizing and placement of the glass pieces before I order anything.
Or if anyone else has a 210 can speak to this too that'd be awesome!