High Tide Aquatics

False Bottom Done

Well one more piece of the puzzle done, built the false bottom for the 180 reef today. Went to tap plastics and bought the acrylic rods and the pvc bottom. The intstructed me that I'd need to use E-6000 which is water proof and will not disolve in the marine enviroment over time.

Have you guys used E-6000 before on the glued edges?
 
To glue the 2" clear rods to that black bottom. The rods will be covered by sand and prevent and rocks from sitting on the bottom. Plus once I start sculpting the rock work I'm going to use 1/2" clear acrylic rods the thread the rocks to form arches and those black sheets will give me a base to glue the thread rods down to, also using E6000.
 
I don't think it's a necessity to use e6000, but I'm not sure. Could probably get away with weldon 16 or something like that. Just a thought, I don't know how much the e6000 goes for vs weldon. How much was the pvc sheet? cheaper than acylic?
 
yup it was $47 for the black pvc - vs - $65. The guy at Tap said the weldon 16 would not work very well when connecting acrylic to pvc, hence why I went with it. Looked at it today it's solid as a rock. all the pegs are dry.
 
Thought about egg crate, but I was concerned that the rocks could crush the egg crate and leave those little white plastic bits floating around, and if those go sucked up in the over flow they would cause major probs, so this way I know that they will not chip off. Also think I saw something similar to this at Steinhart. But they had a fake bottom that was bare and they drilled a large piece of live rock and made it loo suspended off the bottom using the rods.
 
I've never heard of a false bottom before. The closest I can think of is the old undergravel filters. What purpose does this serve?
 
I was planning on using it to help keep my rock work suspended so that flow could go beneath my rock work. This should help reduce detritus buildup,which seems to be a problem when going bare bottom
 
supports the rockwork and keeps it off bottom of the tank. And stops fish from digging under the rocks and having them move around

Here's a crude diagram. The tan is sand FYI
 
[quote author=kurplunk link=topic=6142.msg77876#msg77876 date=1233517744]
I was planning on using it to help keep my rock work suspended so that flow could go beneath my rock work. This should help reduce detritus buildup,which seems to be a problem when going bare bottom
[/quote]
IMO, not as much a problem as you think, because the sand is not there to physically catch stuff, the detritus tends to pile up in spots where the flow along the bottom reaches "dead points", which makes it a breeze to suck out with a siphon because usually there might be one or two of such dead spots.

Man Dave would be so sad that I am one of the converted
 
Back
Top