High Tide Aquatics

Will's 300g Re-Do

Far be it for me to question a professional tank builder as I sure as hell don't know all the little tricks to beef up a tank, but still going to be 30" tall and only 1/2" thick glass?
 
Do you have any close ups of that stand? It looks like 2" square tube for the vertical members and steel angle around the base. I thought I could see leveling feet too. Is that right?
 
sfsuphysics said:
Far be it for me to question a professional tank builder as I sure as hell don't know all the little tricks to beef up a tank, but still going to be 30" tall and only 1/2" thick glass?
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Fair question. Not everyone that I reached out to gave me an estimate for 1/2". My understanding is that having reinforced or armored seams makes a big difference as well as the top and bottom euro brace. Also, the top brace was not required, but extra insurance.

Here's a pic trying to show the reinforced seam.
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Flagg37 said:
Do you have any close ups of that stand? It looks like 2" square tube for the vertical members and steel angle around the base. I thought I could see leveling feet too. Is that right?
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That's exactly right. The top rails are 2x4. The three intermediate vertical supports in the rear are 1 1/2", but the rest are all 2x4. And, there are 6 leveling feet.
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Yeah Crystal Dynamics gave me two prices on an 8' long tank, one that was too much for me to spend with reinforced seams, and another that was WAY too much for me to spend with 3/4" glass. I tried to communicate my desire to keep things at 1/2" and was willing to sacrifice size but whomever I was talking to kept assuming I wanted the largest tank possible, when I kept stating I was willing to sacrifice size to keep it under a budget. Plus I was told (through another party) that 3/4" starphire was a bit of a rare commodity so when there's a shortage (which there was apparently *shrug*) the prices go sky high.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Yeah Crystal Dynamics gave me two prices on an 8' long tank, one that was too much for me to spend with reinforced seams, and another that was WAY too much for me to spend with 3/4" glass. I tried to communicate my desire to keep things at 1/2" and was willing to sacrifice size but whomever I was talking to kept assuming I wanted the largest tank possible, when I kept stating I was willing to sacrifice size to keep it under a budget. Plus I was told (through another party) that 3/4" starphire was a bit of a rare commodity so when there's a shortage (which there was apparently *shrug*) the prices go sky high.
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Yeah...I hear you. My understanding from Trent was that the shortage was for US made starfire, and he doesn't use Chinese glass. I would bet that there are others that do use Chinese glass.
 
Next came move in day. There were 8 of us and we needed everybody.

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Once we got it to the front door, we had to carry it because we didn't want to risk denting the floors with the cart wheels.
Not sure if there is a better way to embed the video?

 
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Problem I saw was that you had a bunch of people in front but only 2 guys in that back corner. Meaning a lot of lift in the front but 2 guys holding that back side causing the tank to tilt backwards. But glad it worked out with no issues.


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I only used one of the external overflow boxes because it is going to be a lot easier managing one BeanAnimal rather than two. So, the right internal box is plumbed to drain into the left external box. I had to drill a hole in the external box to fit another bulkhead to make that happen. While it took some effort to not have the bulkheads on the right internal box not leak (since it did not have an external box), having just the one external box is making life easier. So far, I have learned that with these Synergy ghost overflows, that the water needs to be pretty high in the external box, otherwise you hear the water flow loudly as it goes from the internal box to the external box. And I really like having the larger amount of lineal overflow that the two boxes provide.
 
Getting the 2 sumps in place. Because I decided that I wanted a little more overall volume, I went back to a slightly taller sump. Not quite as ideal from a maintenance perspective, but now I will have a large refugium.

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Drilling for the two bulkheads to attach the two sumps together.

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On a spur of the moment, I decided to use some eggcrate that I had lying around to organize all my cords, power bricks (13+), controllers, and Apex. I think it should work pretty well…certainly much better than how I had it organized before. Also using a couple of DJ8 power strips for my items that don’t need to be plugged directly into the Apex EB8. Not quite finished with it yet. Still have few things to add and organize.

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ah cord management... absolutely horrible thing in reefing. As Murphy's law will make it happen once everything is neat and tucked away no less than 1 week later you'll have to go fishing to remove a cord and it will no longer be neat.
 
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