Kessil

Mike's rebuilt Lee Mar...

S

sfsuphysics

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... oh boy not another tank!

... although not technically rebuilt (and by technically, I mean its not rebuilt, it's being rebuilt :D)

Well with my luck with tanks I'll find a way to break this one too and need another!

So as much as I like to ramble I'm really going to try to keep this short. This tank was an inspiration started from when the other guy cracked his 200+ gallon lee mar in his truck :D Discussion was started someone said they're to the point they want to give it away, I said I'd take it. At the time it was just a "lets see if I can fix it" mindset. Well things changed.

Old 115g soft tank had the overflow carved in the back external like, unfortunately the old one leaked too much, so I replaced it with what I thought would be a brilliant job, and it was... until it started leaking too (that whole acrylic & glass bonding thing needs some work :D), well as I tried to remove the overflow, I remembered I welded the acrylic to both sides of the glass... so tried force.. dur... crack.. end of tank (there's a thread somewhere with that info). Ok everything went to the 100g acrylic emergency tank I just broke down not a month earlier... due to me breaking it (seeing a pattern here?) well I need to get into action to fix that Lee Mar tank!

Ok enough back story.. the tank is 32" long x 24" wide x 24" tall, no starphire (I'm pretty sure), one of those ugly internal overflows, and the glass is 1/2" thick.. pretty heavy little tank.. roughly 70-75 internal gallons or so.

Here's the crack, the entire bottom is borked.
crackbn3.jpg


Either way I was thinking about ways to fix it... I got really desperate at one time and though I could just slather the whole thing with silicone... luckily the crack extended into the overflow box so that wouldn't have worked... but hey... :D

Then I got the idea of PVC sheets by seeing a few of the A.G.E. aquariums.. found the adhesive that I need to get the two to bond, now the question was to simply slip it on top of the broken glass, or remove the glass and do it up proper.

Well I decided to remove the old glass because I didn't know how much it'd shift etc...

Unfortunately the glass was inside the side panels, so I would have to remove the silicone that's "in the crack" to get it out... so I came up with the brilliant idea of cutting it out! First with a razor blade (which failed), then I had some brass wire that I could fish through and give it and saw along the seam.
fishinggo3.jpg


Which worked brilliantly! Until I got a snag and the wire broke. Apparently parts of the glass were compressed a little bit tighter than others... again and again nothing.. fine I'll work on the overflow... broke wire after wire... the thing is to get wire thin enough to fit through it actually is quite easy to break! Well brilliant guy that I am as I had my head in my hands I noticed out of the corner of my eye some fishing line! Dur dah dur!!! Had a fairly high strength 25 pound IIRC, and sawed the overflow right off no problem (ok it took a while but no broken line!)
(no picture)

Unfortunately the bottom was proving to be to much, those tight points simply would not let me saw through. So I got the idea of drilling some holes with a small tile/glass drill bit... I figure if I go sloppy I'd put another crack in it, then can remove it smaller pieces. That didn't work either... a couple times I did hit the bottom with a hammer just to "force it" but damned if the glass never so much as chipped! Well I whacked the drill (with glass bit) against the glass and sure enough instant chip! Hello.... again and again and again I went... at the point I was running on destructive adrenaline... well one such whack popped a hole right through the center and that glass split in multiple directions outward from the hole!

Too bad I don't have pictures of this act, I was so happy that I made a ton of smaller pieces, that I simply worked out each jagged piece one at a time and who cares if silicone was still on it, not for long!

TADA! Glass is gone!
p1280352pw9.jpg


And although this looks like it might be a rimless tank... its not, that's the bottom! You can see where the overflow was, I still need to take a razor and remove all the old junk. I haven't made up my mind if I'm going to use the old overflow, I might, I'm not going to try to cut an external in this, the glass is just too damn thick for me to want to try. I was thinking PVC overflow (not pipes) however the guys at Tap plastics cut my PVC to size, and while might have been a bit more expensive than other plastic shops, I got the exact size I needed and didn't need to buy a whole 4'x8' sheet of it!
p1280353zi0.jpg


And here's the PVC, there's actually two sheets I'm going to sandwich and glue together. The bottom is going to sit flush with the stand (whenever I get the chance to build that) so I'm not terribly worried about the overall strength of the bottom, it's not a floating bottom like you see on many glass tanks. However these two sheets were pretty damn heavy, not quite glass heavy, but closer to glass than acrylic in weight. Need to order the silicone I need and weldon to get everything ready.
p1280354iy5.jpg


So that's all for now... only interesting observation is there is an uber-amount of static cling to those pvc sheets I tried to wipe off some dust from them and half the cat hairs on my sweater flew off my sweater onto the sheet!

I'll see when I can get more time to work on it, this weekend is out (Superbowl), but maybe I'll just bang away at it a bit at a time. I'm going to make this an anemone tank, mostly because all the corals in the other tank would be really packed in here, so keep an eye out for really cheap coral giveaways (but it is weedy corals so you're basically going to pay for rock :D)
 
HA! That first picture was quite a while back, so I haven't done much work on it at all.

But when I do side step procrastination I am quite proficient at making this happen.

But to answer your last question yes I do, but I'm a teacher at a college, which means I don't have 40+ hour work weeks like most of you other working stiffs :D
 
Ugh...

Well considering the silicone needed to bond pvc to glass requires a good 2 weeks of curing time, that doesn't look terribly feasible. (I still have to order the stuff), but I probably could have a tank with water on the floor... I just don't want to half-ass a stand (which I need to build from scratch as well)
 
Looking good Mike.. You have undertaken some pretty serious tank building and fabricating jobs.. Two Thumbs up for some good old fashioned Macguyver :) If you need fishing line again for soemthing like that I have all kinds of spools of spectra.. It's a braided line that is about a quarter of the diameter of monofilament for identical breaking strength. Stronger than Kevlar...

I have an ultrawide 240 that could use some of your good DIY lovin.. :)
 
Ooof

Problem is I need *MY* new tank to replace your temporary one Doug, not just another larger temporary tank! :D Unless you just want help getting it water ready, then yeah I could help with that ;)
 
Hahahah.. No problem Mike. This one had a center island overflow originally that was removed. I have to grind off the left over glue and acrylic bits.. Then give the whole thing a good buffing and it'll be ready :) Constant state of upgrade and repair :)
 
Alright so I was about to do an update to this tank thread, finally found the thread, and realized... I NEVER UPDATED THE DAMN THREAD! Could have sworn I posted pictures somewhere.

Ok so imagine a big central pillar covered with rose anemones... cube(ish) tank (not quite perfect cube), 80 gallons of volume, built my home made stand and canopy (and those who know me, know I like to do framing and that's about it, I don't have the fine carpentry skills, only the rough ones :D).

Anyways, the update to this thread now, is that the tank is officially offline. Its not because the tank had a leak, or any of that, in fact the tank was quite fine as far as all of that, so my PVC bottom worked great (HA! Take that AGE!). No the reason it came down is because it was slowly being overrun by aiptasia, most of the rocks that were in direct light had them, they were growing between some zoas, they grew in the corners, on the glass, around the return pipe outflow, in the overflow (darkened area, aiptasia were quite clear and colorless in those areas), in the refugium, growing on chaeto, in chaeto, on in the sand, on the sand, in the sump, on the sump walls, on a freaking heater FFS! So needless to say even though I managed to score a huge bottle of Aiptasia X when OT went under there was no way I was going to kill all of them as the ones in the overflow were a bit unreachable, and while I did try to keep them under control in the display that didn't work very well, while I did want to try peppermint shrimp, I had a coral banded shrimp in the tank that probably would have made short work of them.

The real nail in the coffin is when one of my RBTAs went wandering a little too closer to the vortech, I saw him on the glass near it earlier but stupid me didn't think.. a few hours later bright pink stuck to the side of the pump... removed him, flushed it (yeah I know they can survive but really... the water was cloudy as a result, anyways there's easily 10 others in the tank) and it was time to go into action! I had a plan I just had to find some free time and make it work.

Also I also found some pocillipora that was in that tank for about a week which I eventually removed but it was long enough that they spawned and were growing everywhere, including right text to aiptasia seemingly unaffected by them, now as much as I'd like to have let that experiment run through, I really didn't feel like paying PG&E to watch it happen.

I did not want to put the rose anemones in my SPS tank, having those guy wandering around would have just been trouble... besides there's no damn room in that tank! So I used a spare acrylic tank I got from Arnold, I believe he called it the swiss cheese sump... either way it had nice thick walls, no brace on top, but there are dividers inside which are effectively braces. Either way they're staying as its a location to keep the buggers.

Put together some pressure treated 2x4s, plywood top, legs, and I have a mini stand, use some wood 1 bys (real 1" material not this 13/16s crap!), put a frame on it so it could hold the lights (which I haven't figured out what I'd do at this point). Most all the swiss cheese holes were previously patched, some not so good so I had to regoop some Weldon16 around them. Was good to go! Since most the anemones were on one big rock I simply moved that one to a garbage can lid, chipped off the 3 aiptasia that were on it (yeah literally weren't very many at all on it, probably due to its vertical walls, very little light on the sides, plus the RBTAs were shading it). Dumped it all in! It's good to go...

Now I'm not going to do a tank build thread on this, so I'll just tie this into my other build thread.

I do now have an empty 80g MikeMar Retro custom job :D And by empty there are dried out aiptasia here and there. I really want to get rid of it (sell it) however I don't want to clean it it all, and the wife made a comment about how much I worked to get that tank up, so there's a bit of a guilt factor there.
 
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