Planet 235 Upgrade - The Requiem Reef

[skyrne_isk]

QT update. On the downside, lost two of the yellow coris wrasses - something internal as their abdomens were distended but not exactly sure as to what.

On the upside, Maculiceps is eating like a pig and added a white tail bristletooth on Friday. He was a little bigger than I expected, and is only in 15G at the moment. Anyone think this isn’t enough real estate? I can move them into a 40G, but the bristletooth isn’t eating all that well yet and didn’t want to set that process back with a move to a different QT setup. Water quality is not an issue, I like to do aggressive 50%+ water changes while my fish are in QT. LMK what you all think on space for the white tail.

 

[skyrne_isk]

Finally! Doors are done. At least, I am happy with them anyway ;)

The last task to finish up once the edges were done was to oil based paint the backsides. Removing any of the dripped epoxy wasn’t too bad, I used 80 grit on an orbital sander to remove all of the thick material buildup around the perimeter.


Wasn’t too much work to get clean. Then I skipped straight to 220 to prep to for paint.


Two coats of semigloss white and I ended up with:


Now all that is left to do is mount them. The plan is to use piano hinges on the side panels, the front panels have drawers slides mounted on their faces to let the doors all slide. You’ll notice the center slides are mounted lower than the outer pairs - this is to allow the center door to be able to slide. The center door likely won’t be moved all that much - but if I do need max access through the front it will only be possible on the left side. The center door will only slide to the right. I’m not running a sump directly beneath the tank but wanted to have easy access if I ever decide to shut down the basement sump and run it directly underneath. (Ignore the vicious beast, he’s just checking out the scrap wood suddenly in his house).


You might also notice the center slides are “backward” with the base part of the hinge facing out. That is because these slides have a release pin (circled) that would be inaccessible if mounted normally with the base plate on the cabinet box. I doubt I will ever need to remove the center door - but now I don’t have to worry about this being impossible, lol.

 

[skyrne_isk]

QT update: Maculiceps and yellow coris are eating great, and now the white tail is doing better as well. He ate morning mysis with gusto, evening pellets he is getting better with.

Copper levels are back to 2.0ppm as of this morning as well, will have to keep checking that feeding stays up. The white tail didn’t have much of a ramp up, but bristletooth tangs usually have a healthy appetite.

 

[skyrne_isk]

Front doors are done! I love it when a plan comes together.

Since the slides were already mounted to the stand (I found it much easier to do this when the stand could be laid on its back), I used some scrap pieces of wood to lay on the floor to shim support the doors for mounting to the slides.

Once the spacing was determined and gaps even, I then marked the edge of the door with the position of the mounting hardware from the slide.


Then the doors were flipped face down and these measurements transferred to the back of the door using a square.



The middle door was easily the trickiest to get mounted - the door was centered on the hinge and the hinge was centered to the stand, but getting the door off the slide was still not too easy to fine tune those last 1/16” increments.

The end doors were a breeze. I had the foresight to mount those slides at the edge of the box, so those measurements were very easy to directly transfer to the back of the end doors.

All done!


And when open they look like

The margins are consistent across the doors - hard to mess that up when using the shim boards in the first pic of this post
;). Am really pleased with this result. Now onto the side doors.

 

[skyrne_isk]

On the display front, I picked up a few wild pieces and a pink lemonade colony over the weekend. Still working with an orange filter to get correct colors to come out but I also bought this, which I am probably the most excited about:



First coral I ever bought was some GSP, and I always like to keep some of I can. Half the time in my tanks they just wither away - probably due to low nutrients - but these pink star polyps are open :beaming-face-with-smiling-eyes:. Hopefully they will grow (but not too much!)

 

[skyrne_isk]

I am using piano hinges to mount the side doors, they are full length doors, so they measure 29 x 35 which is rather heavy. It took me forever to find a suitable part to do the job, but I finally sourced one that was a thick enough gauge material with a big enough center pin and knuckle height to do the job. (I also now know way too much about continuous hinges :))

I bought one 72” hinge and needed to cut it down to two 28” pieces.


Luckily, since I am at the end of multiple projects I can just sacrifice this Diablo blade for the cause.


The cuts ended up decently, needing a little cleanup with a file.


Try as I might, I could not find a hinge that met all my criteria and was a total width of 1/2”. This was the thickness of the slides on the front and needs to be matched by the continuous hinges on the side given the way I built the perimeter border at the top of the stand. This hinge is 7/16” thick, so the extra 1/16” needed is going to come from an aluminum piece of that thickness. It should be no problem.

Since neither piece was predrilled, I get to mark and do it by hand (boo). The holes are alternating on either side of the hinge to keep the screw heads from interfering with the hinge closing completely.

Here the first piece is drilled on both sides (the aluminum shim piece is clamped beneath the hinge on one side).

The holes weren’t quite big enough to accommodate my screws, so I enlarged them to 3/16”. Here is the finished product:

 

[skyrne_isk]

Attaching the hinges to the doors was a breeze.

Next step was hanging the doors on the stand itself. First one, not too bad. Marked the stand at a standard offset and again used a shim scrap piece of wood to set the top gap distance.

Then it was just a matter of setting two screws and then fiddling with the angle of the hinge to get the door squared with the front and top of the cabinet.

All done!


And here’s the other.


One of the doors I fought with for an hour to make it square only to realize that one of the trim pieces at the bottom of the stand was milled about a 1/16” thinner than the rest (or else I sanded it down a 1/16” but I find this unlikely). Thought I was losing my mind until I finally saw it!

I’ve got an idea for how to address that - should be an easy fix. Will take that on tomorrow as well as the closing hardware to keep the side doors tight. Right now they are sort of hanging mostly closed. But that will be tomorrow’s problem / project.

 

[Daniel@R2R Verified Admin]

Attaching the hinges to the doors was a breeze.

Next step was hanging the doors on the stand itself. First one, not too bad. Marked the stand at a standard offset and again used a shim scrap piece of wood to set the top gap distance.

Then it was just a matter of setting two screws and then fiddling with the angle of the hinge to get the door squared with the front and top of the cabinet.

All done!


And here’s the other.


One of the doors I fought with for an hour to make it square only to realize that one of the trim pieces at the bottom of the stand was milled about a 1/16” thinner than the rest (or else I sanded it down a 1/16” but I find this unlikely). Thought I was losing my mind until I finally saw it!

I’ve got an idea for how to address that - should be an easy fix. Will take that on tomorrow as well as the closing hardware to keep the side doors tight. Right now they are sort of hanging mostly closed. But that will be tomorrow’s problem / project.

Looks awesome!!

 

[skyrne_isk]

So for closing mechanism I went with magnets. Specifically, stainless mounting magnets from KJ magnetics. https://www.kjmagnetics.com/products.asp?cat=210


I centered the magnets on the vertical frame. And basically eyeballed the horizontal placement.

The plan was to then mount metal washers to the inside of the door to mate up with the magnets. There probably was a better to do this involving transferring measurements, but this felt like too much work. While picking up the garage that I had been using a workshop (to my wife’s chagrin) I saw some of my kids chalk on the ground and had an idea.


Why not use the principle of a chalk line to transfer the location of the magnet to the door? And so I did.




Worked like a charm. I mounted the washers and the door snapped shut. And I mean snapped. I looked up the model of magnets I bought and they apparently hold 54lbs. Each. The door itself MAYBE weighs 10 lbs. Overkill is the best kind of kill, sure, but I have no doubt the magnet will eventually tear out of the wood if it gets opened more than a couple times.

So I have a couple options. I can buy the weaker 1” magnets from KJ but first I am going to look up some stainless washers that are hopefully barely magnetic. Would be the cheaper option and I can get them tomorrow. More to come….

 

[skyrne_isk]

So the solution the my obscenely powerful magnets was really simple. I had thought to buy weaker magnets from KJ Magnetics, but on second thought I made a trip down to Ace Hardware. And let me tell you all, if you are in need of random fender washers, Ace is the play not big box stores like Lowe’s and Home Depot! About $5 later I had these in my hands.

The move was to put a non-ferrous stainless washer on top of a ferrous washer. Since I had been using a thick washer to make up the missing 1/16” I had some flexibility to go with any two normal thickness washers I wanted. After some in store testing (I seriously love Ace now) I actually needed to downsize the ferrous washer as a full size washer was still pulled too hard by the magnet through the stainless washer. So the zinc washer pictured below is only 1” and is mounted directly on the door with the stainless washer on top.

The old setup was on the left and new on the right (but flipped upside down for visibility).


To fix the earlier mentioned issue with the trim pieces not being milled to the same thickness (and since I have washers on the mind) I also took the opportunity to shim the slide itself against the door to normalize the gap width with the side door. Easy peasy.

Not exactly perfect, but it’ll do.

And just like that, the stand is done!



Now I get to go back and take everyone through its actual build, which I am pumped about! Get ready for a big update now that the problems and issues have slowed down :D

 

[skyrne_isk]

Under the heading of “Are you freaking kidding me?”

Not sure if I mentioned this yet, but I run a CaRx along with a kalk Rx for alkalinity. My CO2 cylinder emptied in a little less than 4 months which is absurd - I can usually go a year or more between fillups. So I am immediately thinking I have a slow leak at the connection and replace the O-ring, which is probably original to the unit (more on how old later). As I am tightening it down, I hear a crunch and a hiss so I take it back apart and find this.


And I hadn’t even tightened it down much! This is an aquarium plants CO2 doser and I refuse to let it die. The gauges have been replaced as of a couple years ago due to rust. And I actually rebuilt the unit with a new solenoid earlier this year when it quit working.

For anyone interested, the manufacturer is Clippard and they have a micro solenoid product that is pretty easy to replace in the aquarium plants controller box. You have to cut into the box, but it’s pretty easy to do once you do.

Oh and the solenoid costs like $30, a little cheaper than the $400-500 I thought I saw on new entire doser.

Opened control box:


Just a tiny air tube onto the threaded nipple screwed into the solenoid.



I have yet to seal the box back up, but it’s on my list.

So back to the current problem, some time on my neighbors bench vice and some pipe wrench time gave me this:

Anyone know the size of the nipple on these things? I’ll be off to the welding shop tomorrow
to ask them if no one does. There was also some glue/sealant used on the threads - does anyone have an idea what is standard to use on gas fittings?

I have had this carbon doser for at least a decade and like I said, I refuse to let it die…. not when we’ve come this far :face-with-head-bandage:

But I always keep a spare, so will be using this backup for now. An old Reef Fanatic regulator.

 

[skyrne_isk]

The stand update

Since I started this thread about the time the new tank showed up and was installed, I get to go back through most of the build and document how a lot of the decisions got made and work got done in my own time. So it’s all out of order for you folks, but should be a better quality writeup than if I had tried to do the build and update at the same time. It’s just not my vibe to multitask :)

So as a refresher, the upgrade was to go a foot longer and 6 inches wider than my last tank. I also had to keep the stand shorter than 34” so it would fit through the front door. I looked hard at aluminum stands, but ultimately wasn’t sure I could achieve my desired look with that frame (especially since I haven’t done a steel or T-slot aluminum stand before). Most of my builds have improved on things I hadn’t gotten quite right before and I wanted this reef and stand to not have a lot of hindsight regrets. So I went with wood.

The first big decision to make is framing material. I went with poplar, as mentioned before. Poplar is a fantastic wood, right in between hard and soft. I still consider myself a novice carpenter and I find poplar very forgiving and easy to finish.

That being said, to source poplar frame sticks I went to my local mill and asked for 2x6 around the headers and 2x4 for everything else. If you want to sound like an expert, also ask for “S4S” wood which means “sanded and surfaced on all 4 sides”. Since I knew my measurements and finished product needed to be within 1/16” of spec I knew that standard 2x pieces from a big box store wouldn’t work (with my skills anyway). Any carpenter will tell you no piece of wood is straight, but standard framing 2x from big box stores are a whole other level of awful. I end up fighting the imperfections of boards so much I don’t enjoy the project. The S44 lumber from the mill I go to is about as dead on perfect as you can get. And is really enjoyable to work with.

I didn’t take a pic of all the lumber loaded up in my truck, but here it all is in my improvised workspace with the top and bottom frames already built. I didn’t miter the corners, just butt joints glued and screwed.


A little excess glue to clean up. I prefer liquid nails at this step over wood glue (Polyvinyl acetate products). You can let it squish out of the joint and then easily remove the dried excess with a knife.


Next step was to cut all the vertical supports. A kreg jig is used to drill all the countersinks that will be used to screw the top frames together. Marking all the boards with a square ahead of time saves you a lot of headache later to make sure you are getting adequate penetration of the screws into both pieces.

 

[skyrne_isk]

Here is a shot of the last leg getting connected. On the front, there are two verticals in the corners -since it will be open. In the back only one leg in the corner since the back will be reinforced with a sheet of 3/4” plywood. Plenty of clamps used here to make sure the faces of the legs are square with the frames.

Next step was to actually put the top deck on as the goal was to have no exposed plywood edges anywher but the rear of the stand. Here is the stand just before this step.

Getting the top on at this step also gives you a good opportunity to correct for any racking/ squaring that may be present. There was also
a slight bow in the front lengthwise memeber. Another clamp work before screwing took care of that.

Before:


After

 

[skyrne_isk]

Next step was to affix the top rail on three sides and the poplar 1x trim that covered the base frame. Pretty standard stuff, but since I wanted the doors to fit flush with the tank itself they needed to be recessed. And since recessing them wasn’t an option I actually built the stand 1 1/4” too small on three sides to mimic this effect. The finish rail/rim would then give me this length and width back. 1 1/4” was the dimension as this was the combined thickness of the slides (1/2”) and the doors (3/4”). On the boards for the front side of the top rim I left them a little long when they were glued and pinned and just routed them flush after the side pieces were put in place.

A palm router is such a friend to get perfect flush mating of two surfaces here. It’s something I would never have thought to do in some of my earlier builds. But over time you think ahead a little bit more and these little details add a lot of quality to the finished product!


It’s probably worth noting that on all the top rim I DID use polyvinyl acetate (wood glue) and plenty of clamps to laminate these pieces to the 2x frame. The process was to spread a thin even coat of glue on both pieces and then pin in place with 18ga pins. Then come after with clamps to ensure a solid bond.

PVA is much stronger than a liquid nails type adhesive, at about 3000-4000 psi. I think I ballparked the filled weight of the tank at maybe 3500lbs total - which is over 72 x 36 = 2,592 square inches. So an average around 1.4 psi of loaded weight. With a PVC bottomed tank the weight should be relatively evenly distributed across this surface area - much more so than a framed tanks where this load would be just on the edges of the stand. So yeah, it’ll be fine - and even if it was a framed tank.

 

[skyrne_isk]

I ran into a pretty significant snag at this point due to serious oversight on my part that came back to bite me. The rim of the stand consists of two strips of 4” trim pieces, one at 3/4” thick and the other at 1/2”. I had the mill make 1/2” pieces from 3/4” stock and started with the 1/2” layer first and here is my mistake. I did not check to ensure the 3/4” and 1/2” pieces were the EXACT same width (3 1/2”) and as it turns out the base 1/2” piece was about 1/8” wider than the outer 3/4”. Of course I only noticed this AFTER the wider piece had been glued and pinned in place.


If the wider piece was on top, a flush trim router bit would have made quick work of the excess material. But since the wider board was on the bottom I had to improvise.

I used a straight cutting bit on the router and left the thinnest piece of material on the base piece. If the router bit were to get into the board below there wouldn’t be any way to fill it. If you look closely here you can see this little strip of material - it was probably 1/16” thick.


Then I came by with the scraper and removed the last little bit of wood and most of the glue.


I had to hand sand with a block quite a bit to get all the glue and router bit marks. But in the end it turned out pretty good.

 

[skyrne_isk]

After skinned with 1x poplar, I put a 3/4” sheet of plywood on the back as well. Pretty basic stuff I didn’t keep a photo of. I prefer to use oil base paint on the inside of the stand. Here is the painting in progress of the stand upside down.

I also wanted to take the opportunity to try an epoxy pour for the top surface of the stand. Of course the tank would cover it anyway, but I had never done an epoxy pour before, and wanted to try it out on something that basically would never be seen in case it went wrong.

Here is the epoxy I went with and it worked out great:

Amberart 1 Gallon Epoxy Resin Kit (64oz Resin + 64oz Hardener) Clear Epoxy Resin for Countertop, Table Top, Art, Craft, DIY, Wood & Resin Molds
https://a.co/d/i5CFNgl

I only wanted the pour to be on the top surface - typically a countertop pour is allowed to flow over the edges of the surface as well. Since I intended to finish the doors with Polycrylic as I did in the previous posts, I taped off the edges with painters tape and wax paper to only epoxy the top of the stand and finish the sides of the laminated rim to match the doors.


I added a metallic pigment to the epoxy just to see how it would turn out. A basic mica powder was bought on Amazon and added to the epoxy mix.

Mica Powder - 60g Mica Powder for Epoxy Resin - Pearl Pigment Powder Dye for Resin/Eye Shadow/Soap Making/Nails/Bath Bombs etc. (White)
https://a.co/d/47vg7D5

I read conflicting reports about using latex paint to tint epoxy but was too chicken to add a liquid to the wet epoxy. The flake worked out decently, but really showed any smoothing done with the spatula after the pour. It also picked up faint patterns where bubbles popped.

To calculate how much to mix, I used a basic L * W * H calculation to get to a cubic inch total that would then be converted to ounces of mix. I only wanted a depth of 1/16” so my measurements were 72” * 36” * 1/16” = 162 cubic inches. 1 cubic inch = .554 ounces. So I needed right at 90 ounces of mix. Most of the guides I watched indicated add and extra 10% for wastage and runoff so I mixed up 100 ounces.

Here was the initial pour. I was officially nervous at this point


About 10 minutes of smoothing with a drywall spatula gave me this.


If you look around the edge you can see where I used the spatula to run parallel to the edge of the stand. The pour isn’t uneven but the pigments were shifted differently relative to the rest of the pour and mica pigments picked this up. So in retrospect I would have found a different tint or mixed a lot more epoxy that didn’t require much working of the material at the edges. I mixed up near the minimum which required a decent amount working the epoxy to get even coverage at the edges.

But the quality of the pour was great, here is a shot that picks up the light a little better. The product I used did a great job self leveling.

 

[skyrne_isk]

I needed knockouts for plumbing and electrical access in the back. Templates were screwed into the back plywood panel and then routered out. I used a file the clean up any of the splinters left behind.

 

[skyrne_isk]

Last step!

The slides for the front doors were mounted while I could flip the stand on its back. Much easier to position the slide rails when they are laying on a horizontal surface. The slide lengths were selected to be just shorter than the door width. Here are the slides I with. They are also overtravel (a big deal) and soft close (not so much).

https://www.rockler.com/centerliner...-cc-comfort-close-drawer-slides-drawer-slides
I had thought to center the outside doors on the frame, but because I had two doors that were going to slide in the sam direction, the placement ended up being to put the top slide for the middle door at the edge of the opening and then the outside slides parallel but just adjacent so the middle slide could operateZ I had BARELY enough room.

All mounted.


Test opening, a tight fit. You can also see what I mentioned on the earlier door mounting posts that the middle door slide is mounted upside down. This is so the release pin is accessible after mounted.

And that’s all for the stand! Now back to the living things!!

 

[skyrne_isk]

On the living side of things, first eggs in the new tank!


This pair has usually been like clockwork with spawning, but I hadn’t seen any egg clutches in a couple months at least. I almost missed these until I saw the mag all balled up and noticed the male tending to them. Usually they don’t lay them so far up under the oral disk - more out by the edge. They must have laid these a week+ ago as they aren’t bright orange anymore. Glad to see my oldest fish are feeling at home in the new tank.

I have a little bit of cyano going on in the corners of the sandbed, but am sure that will right itself in time. Most of the SPS are going through tons of growth already. On the downside, I had to frag one of the wild pieces I bought as it was RTN ing from the base. And most of the frags from the colony were toast over the weekend.


But overall am pleased with how it’s going. There is already plenty of coralline growing on the new right side rock structure. I don’t think I mentioned it earlier, but I built this structure using old dry rock from previous builds. For the first time, I did a muriatic and then bleach bath (but not at the same time!) on this rock before building and it really seems to have done a good job stripping off any nutrients soaked into the rock.


One thing I do need to figure out is a decent camera - these iPhone pics just aren’t cutting it. If anyone has a suggestion for any models drop them here - I don’t want to sink a fortune into it as outside this thread I probably wouldn’t use it much. Would definitely be buying used. Any photogs out there???

 

[skyrne_isk]

…..I got something :smirking-face: