10 Gallon Re-scape : A Story of 3D Printing and a Desire for Efficiency

[GrumpyAlison]

Working on 3D printing myself some more random custom frag racks for my little 10 gallon tank to see if I can maximize efficiency without destroying the look of the tank (with eggcrate ).

The current tank:

It looks terrible, but it's stable and grows things faster than any other system I have The problem I'm facing is making space for some new frags that are coming because I'm completely out of space right now (and I may have gone a bit nuts with black Friday sales...).

My plan is to move some of the larger leathers and 3d print myself some more custom frag racks to maximize vertical space (mostly above the rocks since that's stupid inefficient right now). There's already a bunch of little stand alone racks all over the bottom of the tank (which my zoas are colonizing readily), so I'm going to supplement those.

Here's the current theoretical design:

If I counted right, it should hold ~130 frags and leave a bit of room around the edges for my mushroom pile and other stuff that sits on the sand bed. It also accounts for the pile of rocks I have under the racks as well as a place to store the heater and unholy pile of grape caulerpa that accumulates every week (you can see it taking over the tank in the pic above - that's 1 week of growth from maybe 3 4" of caulerpa...), as well as some lower-light areas for my NPS.

I've been printing frag racks for myself for a while and they work really nicely. I figured this time I'd see how much I can streamline the designs to minimize hangers or supports all over the tank.

I'll throw up some updated pics after I get the racks printed, reorganize things & put the new frags in. It should be interesting...

 

[Mastiffsrule]

Hi,

That is really neat looking. Great use of space. Imagine what you could fit into a 180 gallon ;Happy There’s gonna be a lot a frags to take pics of for sure. Can’t wait to see.

 

[Crabs McJones]

Great design! Cant wait to see it implimented

 

[Peace River]

I like the 3D printed designs and the overall concept! Nice work!

 

[GrumpyAlison]

Here’s the before and after shots again.
I printed 3 of the larger frag racks, took out about 4 cups of Caulerpa, moved the big green leather to my softie wanna-be display tank and rearranged some of the existing frags on the bottom of the tank.

Turns out I had a big pile of codium I didn’t know existed under one of the frag racks .

Hopefully this will be enough space for the 20 or so frags that should be here in a few hours...

 

[GrumpyAlison]

I’ve also been working on assorted designs to mount frags vertically/modularly on eggcrate. These have been printed and in my tank for about a year with no signs of degradation (petg plastic) and they’ve not fallen off once, even with my crabs dancing on them. Added benefit of the egg crate ok the back of the tank is my rocks have something to rest on so they aren’t directly on the glass.


Working on some other eggcrate based designs for added functionality in my larger tanks

Added a pic of my weird lavender and white polyp leather and another 3d printed holder for all my macro algae for fun.

 

[SMSREEF]

Working on 3D printing myself some more random custom frag racks for my little 10 gallon tank to see if I can maximize efficiency without destroying the look of the tank (with eggcrate ).

The current tank:

It looks terrible, but it's stable and grows things faster than any other system I have The problem I'm facing is making space for some new frags that are coming because I'm completely out of space right now (and I may have gone a bit nuts with black Friday sales...).

My plan is to move some of the larger leathers and 3d print myself some more custom frag racks to maximize vertical space (mostly above the rocks since that's stupid inefficient right now). There's already a bunch of little stand alone racks all over the bottom of the tank (which my zoas are colonizing readily), so I'm going to supplement those.

Here's the current theoretical design:

If I counted right, it should hold ~130 frags and leave a bit of room around the edges for my mushroom pile and other stuff that sits on the sand bed. It also accounts for the pile of rocks I have under the racks as well as a place to store the heater and unholy pile of grape caulerpa that accumulates every week (you can see it taking over the tank in the pic above - that's 1 week of growth from maybe 3 4" of caulerpa...), as well as some lower-light areas for my NPS.

I've been printing frag racks for myself for a while and they work really nicely. I figured this time I'd see how much I can streamline the designs to minimize hangers or supports all over the tank.

I'll throw up some updated pics after I get the racks printed, reorganize things & put the new frags in. It should be interesting...

Really cool!
I can’t wait to see how it looks when your done! Maybe you could even start selling them. I love the base racks, very different than what’s out there.

 

[GrumpyAlison]

Maybe you could even start selling them.

I intend to I just need to make/fit one or two more little pieces to make them more user friendly, especially for unusually narrow frags which kind of fall out of the current design and then I'll throw them on my etsy and my website. Hopefully that'll be done in the next few days in case anyone needs weird stocking stuffers

 

[GrumpyAlison]

I’m drowning in space! Like I have about 20 open frag spaces.
And my new butt kissers seem to have handled the Shipping well

The slightly higher ground rack is on the printer now and then I’m gonna print some little rings that go between the rack and the frag for stuff like zoas to grow into so I don’t get racks covered in misc overgrowth.
I also dragged some leathers from my other tank since I have so much space XD