40g journal (DIY stand, DIY overflow, DIY sump)

[~RuSh~]

Warning - I move slowly and am very amateurish. I'm probably not the guy you want to watch for expert tips and tricks, lol. This will be me looking for help as much as people getting help from my thread.

Anyway on to the pics.

2x4 frame stand with 3/4inch plywood top and bottom, 1/4 inch skin and trim.











I have the tank all trimmed up. I had already cut the doors to fit the original opening and with the trim on the inside I now have to remeasure and rip them down again. But that shouldn't take too much. Then mount hinges hang doors... and I'm tentatively thinking of using some extra trim I have laying around to add to the doors as center trim or like a square design.

Still need to drill the tank for overflow and return, cut baffles for the sump, and a bunch of other things I'm sure I'm forgetting.

[oldhead]

Doing a nice job so far

[~RuSh~]

Thanks!

[Knighthawk]

Any plans for a controller of any sorts? If so I would recommend making a smaller cabinet that matches to store an ato container and controller of to the side

Sent from my Pixel 2 using Tapatalk

[~RuSh~]

Right now no, no plans to do any controllers or dosing. But I remember back in the day seeing build journals a lot like the one I'm doing now and thinking "I'll never do anything like that, too much!" - ha!

[~RuSh~]

I trimmed up the rest of the stand last night and resized the doors. Ripped them down and put hinges on and mounted. This was probably the most frustrating process I've been through on this tank so far. The hinges I bought were small (mistake #1) and while they hold up the doors fine they just leave little room for error. Mounting the hinges to the inside of the trim was mistake #2, that also leaves virtually no room to move the hinges side to side to adjust for the door swing, because the width of the trim is 3/4 inch. Lastly, I didn't leave enough room for the hinges when I resized the doors so I'll have to rip one of the two doors down again by like 1/8 inch or they won't quite squeeze in together. It's just a big PITA man. Lol.





I'm thinking of leaving the side 'doors' just as panels that I can Velcro in. Pop them in or out when I need to get into the sides if I ever do and call it a day. I'm just really hating hinges that much right now. Lol.

[~RuSh~]

Ok, doors are mounted. They are not even, and they aren't going to be, but I'm just going to have to live with it. The way I mounted the hinges just prevents me from being able to adjust how the doors swing in and out. It bugs me... to like no end, but I can't do anything about it short of ripping off the inner trim and buying new hinges and trimming in a different way. It pains me to say but I think I'm just going to move on for the sake of getting this thing up and off the ground. Next time around I'll think this through better.

I also mounted door stoppers I guess you can call them and put heavy duty Velcro on to hold the doors shut. I did this on the side panels as well. Those will simply be panels I can pop off and back on fastened in with the Velcro on the top and bottom stoppers. I don't anticipate being in and out of the sides a lot but it's a nice option to have if I need to get a different angle on something in the sump. Hopefully have time tonight to trim the doors themselves and then think about paint.

[~RuSh~]

The stand is pretty much done. I think we are going to paint an off white color and distress the paint and then coat with a dark stain to accent the distressed areas. There are quite a few mismatch trim areas and the doors really bug me because they are not even, but I'm going to chalk it up to a learning process. I will do a lot more research before hand and figure out how I want to mount doors before committing to a method so as not to pin myself in a situation that I can't undo. Overall I'm quite happy with the product and cannot wait to move on and get this tank up and running.

[~RuSh~]

Plumbing. Historically not my greatest strength. But I gotta say guys this glass holes all in one kit makes things really easy. (www.glass-holes.com) The kit I ordered came with the overflow box, the bulkhead threads, gaskets and street elbow, and black vinyl tubing to go from the PVC elbow to your sump. Obviously it comes with the diamond coated hole saw (sized exactly for your particular setup) and a template that you can use to help guide you in drilling. Glass holes has a few videos on drilling on their website as well if you haven't done it before and those are helpful.

So I started by placing the overflow box in the tank and just eyeballing where I wanted it to be. I then matched the hole to the overflow box with the template on the outside which I then duct taped in place. I used a squirt bottle with some water to spray the glass and hole saw as I drilled to keep the glass cool. I went slow and honestly didn't apply that much pressure to the tank as I drilled. 90 seconds or so and we popped through.




As you can see, there are some small chips of glass that occur on the inside of the tank while drilling and that is normal. No bid deal. The gaskets cover those up nicely.




I dry fit everything first to make sure I had all my components and then went ahead and cut my tubing to fit and lubed the gaskets and applied pvc paste to my threaded pvc joints. Make sure to snug everything by hand, and don't over tighten. You want your gaskets to be able to flex a bit and over tightening inhibits this and can also cause the bulkheads to crack, since the threads are tapered.





I let everything dry overnight and gave it a water test this morning utilizing the sump (sans baffles). Perfect! Cutting the baffles tomorrow hopefully, getting some paint on the stand and then it will be time for sand and rock.

[~RuSh~]

Got a little more work done last night. I ended up buying two sheets of acrylic and using my old table saw blade to cut. The edges are not perfect but they are passable for sump baffles in my opinion.






I also bought what I thought was everything I needed to plumb in a ball valve off of the return pump, but it turns out that the pump outlet is a 1 inch and all of my other return PVC is three-quarter inch. I plan on coming straight up off the return pump with PVC to a 90° elbow to the ball valve and then to another 90 with an adapter for the vinyl tubing. I could've done PVC all the way up to the bulkhead but I already sealed in the vinyl tubing adapter into the bulkhead. Either way all I need is a 1 inch thread to three-quarter inch thread. Should just be one more piece or so.

[~RuSh~]

Got the stand painted and moved everything into its final place. I had some baffle debacles, but will redo those and we will soon be on to rock and sand and cycling the tank!

[DesertReefT4r]

Those baffles are pretty thin.

[~RuSh~]

Yup, one popped loose so I have to pull them out, maybe go with glass instead.

[~RuSh~]

OK guys I did a little more work this week. I got the sump drained and pulled out the baffles. I replaced it with the .220 inch acrylic. Overall the thicker acrylic is much more sturdy and is what I would recommend for anyone else doing a sump. It doesn't bow at all under the pressure, so the silicone is much more likely to hold up. I water tested that the following day and it held perfectly. I also cut down the vinyl tubing in the back and the return pump now sits evenly and has reduced the vibration a lot. After these two adjustments I put the sump back under the tank hooked up the return pump and filled the tank. The water test was successful, sump baffles held, so I went to the store and picked up sand and salt. I then made a classic rookie mistake and did not rinse the sand before I put it in the tank. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I did four 90% water changes and let the filter sock catch the rest overnight.

I pulled back my ceiling tiles and mounted a piece of plywood across the floor joists. This allowed me to put ceiling hooks in directly above the tank. A little bit of thin gauge wire and some eyeballing and the light fixture was in place.


A day or two after the sand was put in things cleared up and it was time to add rock. I also managed to grab two pieces of live rock from the pet store roughly 10 pounds. Hopefully that will speed up the cycle.



Things are looking good. Just gotta give the cycle some time to get a move on. I'll be 'feeding' the tank food daily - in the amount I imagine the stock I plan to acquire would need - so as to culture a bacteria colony roughly the size that I will need for my future fish. Still thinking about ordering online. Everything from F&S, one and done, no quarantine, just in and done. Or getting a few things here and there from the LFS....