cainechow Posted November 1, 2012 Report Share Posted November 1, 2012 (edited) So Syncro and I were talking about aquariums and how he, being a reefer, wanted to try freshwater planted and how I as a freshwater planted guy, wanted to try reefing. I happened to have all this extra 3mm glass sitting around because i saved a few windows from when my windows got replaced... "Let's build some tanks!" So this is a bit of an essay with photos of what we built. There are some steps that we totally missed pictures for but oh well. We built two aquariums and it took us 4 weekends to get it all done. Not the fastest but we learned a lot. We started out with a design. I really liked the All-In-One design that my aunt has in a 20" x 20" x 20" 37 gallon reef tank and we decided that we'd rip-off the design. Take Apart Some Windows This was not fun. We broke a bit of glass before we figured out how to take apart the old double pane glass. More like double pain glass. Turns out if it is a warm day, utility knives are your friend. We had to slice through the the black goop with the glass on a flat-ish surface. If you pull just wrong, you'll probably break the glass. It is best to slice then scrape. After scraping we used some Isopropyl Alcohol to clean up left over gunk and residue. Cut Some Glass We decided that we would do a tank where the side glass would sit on top of the bottom glass. In retrospect, we should have done a "floating bottom". The floating bottom allows more adjustment side to side and up and down to get your pieces all fitting together nicely. Of course we didn't learn that until after we had cut all our glass. Some other things we learned about scoring and breaking glass is to score smoothly and to break the glass starting at one end and using a twisting (sort of) + tearing motion. If you try to snap the glass all along the whole score line all at once... you often end up with screwed up breaks that don't follow your score line. Sanding the sharp edges with some 1000 grit sand paper will take the edge off but not make it dull looking. We were pretty happy after we finished cutting all the glass including the baffles for the AIO sump in the back. Acrylic Sump Wall We decide on black 3mm acrylic for the back wall of the AIO sump with 45 degree sides rather than going straight across. Had to pull out the old junior high trig to get that one right. We double checked it by making a 1:1 drawing and measuring. Turns out we can still do trig. We used Syncro's router to cut the acrylic. If you go too fast, you break off chunks of acrylic. if you go too slow, the router bit will spray bits of molten acrylic in yo face. It wasn't hard once Syncro got the hang of it. We also munged up some acrylic while learning how to use the router on it. Tip: The ball bearing tipped router bit is awesome for final trimming if you line up your piece so that it has a flat edge to run the ball bearing part over as a guide. To make sure that we had superduper awesome 45deg bends for our back compartment I built a jig out of some scrap wood in the garage while Syncro was spraying molten acrylic everywhere. The jig was easy. Learning to bend acrylic using a propane torch to heat the acrylic was interesting. We tested it on a small piece at first and it was pretty easy, just pass the flame back and forth over the section to be heated and it gets soft. If you don't go far enough past the edge of the acrylic, you'll end up heating the edge more than the rest of the piece and bubble or burn it. We were getting confident now. So we put the acrylic on the jig, covered the section that we didn't want to heat with a 2x4 and went at it. If the final piece is bigger than the test piece, it is going to dissipate heat more if you use the same rate of heating as the test piece. You can heat and heat and heat and it'll never get soft enough to bend. It becomes a balancing act of heating the sheet enough so that it will gain heat on each pass of the torch but not so much that it burns/bubbles. So you wanna get the flame close but not too close and you wanna move it back and forth pretty quickly. If you have it right, after 3 or 4 minutes the acrylic will sag on its own and it can be bent right down on top of the jig. Tip: If you are working with Acrylic, it is probably worth buying a 15.00 heat gun from Home Despot. Silicone: Everyone's Fav Pass-time We used clear GE SCS 1200 pure silicone for this project. It is a construction grade silicone that won't kill your animals. I hear that all the "good tank builders use it". It can be had from Calgary Fastener for something like 7.00 or if you are in the SE, Gold's has it most of the time too. First thing to go together was the baffles on the back glass. We marked the location of the baffles on the outside facing part of the glass with permanent marker, laid down a medium bead of silicone, pressed in the baffles and taped them in place. Once the baffles were in place we siliconed in the acrylic sump wall by laying down another bead of silicone on each baffle and sump wall edge, pressed them together and taped everything down. We let this cure for a week because well we were only really working on the tanks on Sunday afternoons. Any one else could really just wait 12 or so hours or maybe as little as 8 hours if you were stingy with the silicone. Once the sump assembly was cured, we razored any excess silicone away. To prepare the rest of the glass for silicone work we taped up the areas on the inside parts of the glass where we didn't want any silicone. The glass is 3mm and we wanted a 1mm or smaller fillet so we taped 4 mm from the edge of the glass on the bottom, back and front pieces. For the side glass we taped 1mm from the edge. The reasoning is that most if not all the bonding strength in an aquarium is from the silicone between the glass and not from the fillets. After masking, we cleaned up the areas to be siliconed with alcohol. A lot of people will now lay down the glass, line it all up and have the tape all ready to go, lay down silicone, place glass, tape, repeat until all the walls of the tank are up. We used an alternate method. We placed spacers between all the bonding surfaces and taped all the glass in place. Our spacers were those bread tabs that hold bread bags closed. (See? There IS a reason I save those all the time... at least that is what I told my wife.) We used a square to try to make the tank as cube like as possible. Once the walls are all taped up and spaced out, we start injecting the silicone from the inside of the aquarium with enough pressure that the silicone squeezes out from the inside all the way through the spaced gap and out the other side. We removed the spacers as we got to them. Obviously it is easiest to do this with two people. We scraped up as much excess silicone from the inside as possible so the the fillets were as thin as could be. Tip: Cutting a small nozzle opening rather than larger seems to work better. If your silicone tube nozzle is already a bit big, you can squish it down with a pair of pliers to make it a narrow flat nozzle. Tip: Scrape excess silicone soon after application so that it hasn't formed a skin yet. You'll get a smoother finish. Don't lick your finger before scraping the silicone because it causes the silicone to skin and you'll only get one chance to scrape. After letting the silicone cure for 48 hours, we razored away excess silicone from the inside and outside of the tank but discovered that some sections where we passed over too quickly with the silicone injection and didn't notice while working with the silicone. This one was the only really bad section. We went in to fill in those gaps and let those cure. They filled in pretty nicely. We let the repaired sections cure for another 48 hours and then it was time to test fit the pump then leak test. And the water test... No leaks. What would I do different next time? Get nice glass with beveled edges. We spent a lot of time to get as small and as smooth a silicone fillet as we could. It would look even better if we had nice beveled edges on our glass. Get a heat gun to work acrylic Do a floating bottom tank where the side glass doesn't sit on top of the bottom glass but beside the bottom glass. We had a heck of a time lining up the tops of the glass as well as adjusting the side to side dimensions. This would have been easier with the "floating" bottom design. And that is how we built two 10" x 10" x 10" All-In-One aquariums. It was lots of fun. Edited November 1, 2012 by cainechow Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cainechow Posted November 1, 2012 Author Report Share Posted November 1, 2012 Tip: Masking with the green tape was much better than with the tan coloured tape. The green tape was much easier to remove than the tan tape. In the context of real masking, this was better. The tan tape adhered much too strongly and was annoying to remove from the inside of the tank. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DustinWozniak Posted November 1, 2012 Report Share Posted November 1, 2012 Awesome build! Looks great, I'm in the market for a cheap nano tank for Shrimp. I'm a little shorten cash so I'm Ll ears for cheaper options haha. You said it took four weekends right? Is that like hard working? Or more just taking your time? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cainechow Posted November 1, 2012 Author Report Share Posted November 1, 2012 More like figuring out the stuff we didn't even know we didn't know and working in 3 or 4 hour sessions. If you are only building a tank, it is just 5 pieces of glass and silicone. It is fun learning and doing though. Plus it is a huge ego boost to be able to say that you built it all from the ground up. :drunk: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
syncro Posted November 3, 2012 Report Share Posted November 3, 2012 The silicone turned out really nice. With professionally polished edges you could build a better looking tank than most you can buy without going to ADA. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DANA T Posted November 4, 2012 Report Share Posted November 4, 2012 Impressive ! Thanks for sharing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Iceturf Posted November 8, 2012 Report Share Posted November 8, 2012 Glass seems a bit thin. Its not the minimum 10x overthick that one might expect from an AlbertaAquatica DIY project! I hope it works for you, looks neat with the built in false wall. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cainechow Posted November 8, 2012 Author Report Share Posted November 8, 2012 Its 3mm glass and by most aquarium glass calculators gives a safety factor of just under 6? We are more worried about things falling on the tank and breaking it than it actually cracking from water pressure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Iceturf Posted November 10, 2012 Report Share Posted November 10, 2012 Yes I would have the same fear of accidentally knocking into it - so far as water I have no doubt it is strong enough. On that same note - my 3/8" 18 gallon tall, I worry about accidentally knocking into it and having water everywhere so I think I'm just jittery about glass under a certain thickness. I'm giving you a hard time, but i'm just kidding around. Keep posting pictures, its gonna look sharp when you put something in there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gBOYsc2 Posted November 28, 2012 Report Share Posted November 28, 2012 Great little project. I can't wait to see what will be stocked in there. I gotta ask what kind of pump you are going to use that has a low enough gph for this tank? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cainechow Posted November 28, 2012 Author Report Share Posted November 28, 2012 We picked the Hydor Pico Evo 400. I think that's the 100 gph one. Adjustable flow it is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cainechow Posted January 3, 2013 Author Report Share Posted January 3, 2013 Just a quick update. My version of the tank has been cycling for weeks and weeks and I just came into a head of frogspawn. It looks pretty lonely in there. I wish there were real white balance controls on the phone camera! (Anyone know of a good camera app for android?) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
syncro Posted January 11, 2013 Report Share Posted January 11, 2013 Are you thinking of adding a sexy shrimp or two? The greenwater on mine just cleared up. Not sure if it cleared up on its own or if it was because of the reduced photoperiod+Excel+ferts. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cainechow Posted January 11, 2013 Author Report Share Posted January 11, 2013 Looking good. I wonder if the green water issue is just one of the phases of a DSM planted tank. I had that as well when I started the 10g. Looks like your HC is due for a trim. Look really lush. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.