pat8you
Aquarium Advice Addict
Ok so we wanted to build our own frag tank to go next to our main display. We don't have quite enough lighting on our main to do most sps's the right way so a frag tank seemed interesting and a good learning experience as we have just started keeping corals the last couple months. So here is the build with plenty of pictures.
Before i get started i need to send out a big thanks to Ziggy953 and marc from Melevsreef.com - Welcome!. without their guideance and help this project never would have gotten of the ground. Thanks guys.
Also we researched how to work with acrylic and based our design off of informations on melevsreef so if there are things i'm missing its all there in great detail.
So this is what we started with. 2x 24"x48"x 1/4 and one 12"x24"x 1/16 sheets of acrylic.
These are all the things we started out with. We also used a 10" table saw, router table, cordless drill, and a miter saw. There are a few other random things but nothing big and you can fill in the blanks.
So next step was to lay out all the parts and such which we had done before purchasing the acrylic to make sure we had enough material. I just drew it up in paint to help me visualize it and double check i wasn't screwing things up.
The smaller 1/16 sheet was just for the box that goes around the plumbing. Next step was to go out and cut out all our pieces. This is where we used the table saw. Marc suggests you use a blade with 80 teeth. We couldn't find that and grabbed one with 100 teeth and this worked great. One thing I would do differently next time is to make sure to call all the pieces that make up the sides of the box at once with out moving the guide on the table saw. This would ensure that they are all exactly the same hight will i will talk about later. This picture is after we have cut out all the pieces and my brother (jimbo7) is taking a sanding block with a fairly fine grade sand paper to smooth all the edges. Make sure you don't round the edges or corners when your doing this.
I'm gonna break this up into a couple posts. Give me a minute to write out the next part.
Before i get started i need to send out a big thanks to Ziggy953 and marc from Melevsreef.com - Welcome!. without their guideance and help this project never would have gotten of the ground. Thanks guys.
Also we researched how to work with acrylic and based our design off of informations on melevsreef so if there are things i'm missing its all there in great detail.
So this is what we started with. 2x 24"x48"x 1/4 and one 12"x24"x 1/16 sheets of acrylic.
These are all the things we started out with. We also used a 10" table saw, router table, cordless drill, and a miter saw. There are a few other random things but nothing big and you can fill in the blanks.
So next step was to lay out all the parts and such which we had done before purchasing the acrylic to make sure we had enough material. I just drew it up in paint to help me visualize it and double check i wasn't screwing things up.
The smaller 1/16 sheet was just for the box that goes around the plumbing. Next step was to go out and cut out all our pieces. This is where we used the table saw. Marc suggests you use a blade with 80 teeth. We couldn't find that and grabbed one with 100 teeth and this worked great. One thing I would do differently next time is to make sure to call all the pieces that make up the sides of the box at once with out moving the guide on the table saw. This would ensure that they are all exactly the same hight will i will talk about later. This picture is after we have cut out all the pieces and my brother (jimbo7) is taking a sanding block with a fairly fine grade sand paper to smooth all the edges. Make sure you don't round the edges or corners when your doing this.
I'm gonna break this up into a couple posts. Give me a minute to write out the next part.
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