At this point we took a little break to go to a frag swap which was very interesting (first one) and we ended up picking up quite a few little frags for very cheap (15$) I will probably put up updated pictures of my tank in my other tank journal thread which you should all come and "oohhh ahhhh" at my new corals. But when we got home we had no place to put our new frags so we had to set up my brothers little pico tank he will be taking to school next semester.
The 36" fixture for the frag tank was a maybe just a little big for this tank.
But it did the job till we got things set up. Ok so next we made a stand out of 2x4 with a piece of 3/4 ply wood on top to support the tank. I'm sorry i forget to take pictures of this part but it should be very simple. You can see pictures of it completed in a bit. After this we needed to cut the acrylic for the bulkheads to go through the bottom. A hole saw bit and our cordless drill did the trick but it actually started to melt the acrylic as we were drilling so we needed to pour some water over it as we were going to keep things cooled off. Be sure to leave enough room that the bottom of the bulkhead fittings won't hit the edges of the stand and you have enough room for your plumbing. Heres things put together with our plumbing just kind sitting in there to show we had enough room with out hitting the sides of the tank.
Next we needed to make the box that goes around the plumbing which required cutting some teeth in the top edges. Marc has a whole page of different ways to do this on his site but we did things just a bit different. We made a jig of sorts to help guide the piece over the router bit. We started by getting a bit that was the width we wanted the teeth and moving the fence on the router table back the depth we wanted the teeth. I think we ended up going 3/8 wide by 1 3/4 deep. The jig consisted of a flat piece of wood with a bar glued on to guild the acrylic up and down the the table.
On the under side we glued another bar that fit into a groove on the router table that would allow the whole jig to move left and right on the table for the different teeth. We would clam the whole jig to the table so it didn't move while we were cutting each tooth.
It worked quite well and this is what we got when we were done.
