Once the room was prepped, we moved the stand into the room, and I started to make it look a bit more visually appealing. We decided on a Red Oak texture, but I’ll be finishing it with a Brown oak dye followed by a Brown Mahogany stain, topped off with an oil-based varnish. This’ll give a deep warm brown that is typical of many period antiques, and coincidentally match the other furniture in the room.

First order of business was to reinforce the centre of the stand - putting a single...

I moved into this house about 5 years ago, and it's never been decorated since, so with the tank and stand ready and waiting in the garage, it was time to take a long hard look at where we were going to put them. The room is 10’6” wide at the end we want to place the tank, so the tank will take the lions share, leaving gaps at both sides of 15”.


Before any of that can happen though, we needed to get...

So, after a bit of a mix-up with the trucking company (who knew you had to call them to make an appointment to receive a delivery! Why don’t they call you ?), the tank arrived a day late.


It was nicely packaged, strapped down onto a palette, with plenty of foam and wood surrounding it. Given that I’d ordered an acrylic sump as well as the tank itself, the packaging...

The old tank & stand was sold, clearing the way for the new tank to be built and made ready before the new tank arrived.

It’s an 8’x 2’ x 40” stand, built using a 2x8 box (red & yellow, below) supported by 2x4’s (purple) dropping to a 2x4 box (blue and orange) that rests on the ground. It follows the recipe laid down by RocketEngineer. The green pieces aren't load-bearing, they are only there to screw the purple (load-bearing) supports into, and to help make it square....

So this is the build-thread, finally . I closed down my old 180 gallon system last November, and started planning and slowly buying (as I could afford) the equipment and parts to upgrade to the larger system. Some of this is therefore already done. The plan is that the build-log and reality ought to converge around the time when I'll be adding water to the system, around...