I've been in the reef tank hobby for about 15 years now. I started with a 30 gallon freshwater tank converted to saltwater and then over the years, like most of us, that evolved into a 120, I moved, downsized to a 75, which the next year doubled to a 150...I moved again and decided if I was going through all the effort to move everything I might as well put it in a bigger tank, a 240. Then of course I moved again, and had the same moment of clarity and ended up with a 320. I've always been interested in building tanks, so the 150 and the 240 were both built in my garage out of acrylic when I lived in Florida. They were a ton of fun to do but since I felt like I had gotten pretty good at that I decided the next tank was going to be, of course, even bigger! I was wooed by posts at MonsterFishKeepers about plywood tanks. I said to myself, "That looks easy enough!" So I started down the path of designing and building a plywood tank with acrylic windows. As the title of this thread implies, that was a colossal mistake. I certainly made some bonehead decisions along the way, but I really want this thread to be a word of caution, and maybe you can learn from some of the issues I ran into and mistakes I made. #nofilter
You may be asking yourself why I would go and replace a 320 with a larger tank, or maybe not, because bigger in this hobby is universally better. But I really would have been ok with keeping this tank.
It's just that it has crazed badly. Unfortunately, the previous tank was at my place of employment. To make a long story short, my boss decided to move to New York on short notice so I needed a solution quickly and didn't have time to build a new tank and I really didn't want to risk moving a 240 (I worked for a University at the time and he was moving the lab! The tank was in our reception area). I ordered a 96x36x24 from FishTanksDirect which is another long story but to keep it short, they make tanks out of acrylic that's far too thin, it bowed and crazed on both viewing panes. I hated looking at the thing.
And that's when, after spending countless hours on MonsterFishKeepers and watching youtube videos I got the bright idea to build a plywood and acrylic tank (spoiler, there are only a handful of ways to be successful with acrylic windows...just use glass). I designed the whole thing in SketchUp to be sure all of the measurements were right and finally pulled the trigger on the build last September (It hurts to type that).
I filled up the CUV at Lowes with some wood and ordered all of the necessary components for the build of this monster which turned out to have outside dimensions of 105x43x43, internal dimensions were 97x37x37, so just over 500 gallons. On the next post I'll go into the details of the build of the tank, the problems I ran into and the 1200watt DIY light fixture I assembled for this project.
You may be asking yourself why I would go and replace a 320 with a larger tank, or maybe not, because bigger in this hobby is universally better. But I really would have been ok with keeping this tank.
It's just that it has crazed badly. Unfortunately, the previous tank was at my place of employment. To make a long story short, my boss decided to move to New York on short notice so I needed a solution quickly and didn't have time to build a new tank and I really didn't want to risk moving a 240 (I worked for a University at the time and he was moving the lab! The tank was in our reception area). I ordered a 96x36x24 from FishTanksDirect which is another long story but to keep it short, they make tanks out of acrylic that's far too thin, it bowed and crazed on both viewing panes. I hated looking at the thing.
And that's when, after spending countless hours on MonsterFishKeepers and watching youtube videos I got the bright idea to build a plywood and acrylic tank (spoiler, there are only a handful of ways to be successful with acrylic windows...just use glass). I designed the whole thing in SketchUp to be sure all of the measurements were right and finally pulled the trigger on the build last September (It hurts to type that).
I filled up the CUV at Lowes with some wood and ordered all of the necessary components for the build of this monster which turned out to have outside dimensions of 105x43x43, internal dimensions were 97x37x37, so just over 500 gallons. On the next post I'll go into the details of the build of the tank, the problems I ran into and the 1200watt DIY light fixture I assembled for this project.