I have not had much seat time in the past several weeks.
I decided that it was time to go ahead and actually finish this tank and stand with my free time, and decided to do very minimal posting, journaling, or blogging.
Besides a couple of updates, I have not given many details, so this takes off since the post on 04/06
After shattering the rock which I planned my whole original hardscape around, I decided to spend more time working on the stand.
I sanded the piece of plywood I made for the rabbeted edges of the inset platform for the tank itself, and just spent a good full day going from 40 grit, to 60, to 120, to 150, to 400, to 600, to 1500 with my simple manual palm sander. All the while, messing around in my head with how I would scape it with a broken beautiful piece of rock I drilled out and burst into two pieces earlier in the day.
I played around with a couple of different stains, including the same one which I used for the side skins. My first run, I tried to keep it pristine, but ended up with the same PROBLEM as the side skins, and saw more of "my floor is growing" in it than what I wanted to see -- contrast.
I went to work, and talked to one of the painters. The Minwax I was looking at kept going back and forth between Red Cherry and Ebony. I wanted it somewhere in both, and my compatriot advised combining them together, and showed me some work he had done by doing so. I bought both the stains, and picked up a wipe-on polycrlic - something, I had never used before.
While my coworker's suggestion was to combine the two, I tried several different combinations on some spare blocks of wood (amazing how those things just build up over time when building something out of the garage), and liked a particular combination and THANKFULLY, had been smart enough to write it down on the same block of wood ( I highly recommend doing this to anyone who wants to find a "perfect stain." )
First, I had to sand off the entire stain I had previously put on and start fresh. It wasn't too bad, and the remnant stayed inside of the dark rings, where I wanted it to be. My main concern was the poly-fill which had been used by the mill to make the plywood look somehow better. It didn't, and the stain is what I was hoping could hide those man-made blemishes.
Now, I would like to go off on a tangent about this inset platform.
The main purpose of the inset platform was always to hide a configuration of coral fluorescing t5s, or LEDs.
I have never cared for lights shining down on a tank when it came time for corals to be appreciated under whatever moonlight configuration would or could make it happen. The only real way around this is to build a canopy right over the tank, and really pay great mind to keeping water levels tight (not too difficult with auto fill systems and overflows), and angling the lights in an effective way.
This makes a less than ideal scenario for rimless tanks, as the entire point of them is to ELIMINATE the canopy, raise the light sources high, and facilitate both operating and maintaining the tank, as well as seeing down into the tank, something completely negated by the desire to hide moonlighting entirely.
So, I dreamed up a concept of illuminating it from below.
I worked on a Freshwater planted concept for a competition which I never got to attend using a couple different man-made materials in order to create an illusion, but NEVER got to implement it in competition due to a terrible scheduling conflict, and this all happened a year ago. I didn't see myself getting the opportunity to compete in this year's competition for another hand at it, and instead of putting all my eggs into one basket, I decided to diversify my concept, and attempt it with corals.
This is where the whole inset platform comes in.
By concealing as many light sources that fit in the platform, my idea was to have all moonlighting occur by radiating into and then out of the tank at night. I had never tried it this way, and I certainly had never tried it with corals (and now, ironically, but designing such a system, I have learned now how to do it with almost any existing tank with relative ease).
None of my existing lights fit into the platform.
I went onto Ebay, and started looking for strip LEDs in the 400 to 450 spectrum, as well as t5h0 setups for the same. I found both, at reasonable prices to test. The strip lights I got for about 10 bucks each, and a single 24" t5ho fixture that would fit right into the front panel (mind you, I've only got about 3 inches of room there with the way I cut the platform). -- Let me interject --
I have built a couple of custom t5ho lighting rigs at work, and single lamp fixtures are difficult to find ballasts for, especially now that the EPA has dipped so dangerously into cross spectrum elimination of the ballasts for almost anything other than legacy products,and finding a single lamp ballast for t5ho, especially at 24", is almost impossible.
So -- going back to a single 24" t5ho fixture off of ebay - It was too good to be true. The fixture came in, and is one of the strangest things I have ever seen. It is a custom lamp that is actually longer than a standard 24" bulb, and it does not have a servicable ballast, nor DESIGNED for removing the lamp. I persisted, and managed to make a work around. I was able to make the fixture take a standard length 24" t5ho, should the existing lamp burn out. Alternatively, I might be able to just build my own once this ballast burns out.
(helios t5-ii. I still don't undertad what the ii means, especially since there is only one lamp)
I decided that it was time to go ahead and actually finish this tank and stand with my free time, and decided to do very minimal posting, journaling, or blogging.
Besides a couple of updates, I have not given many details, so this takes off since the post on 04/06
After shattering the rock which I planned my whole original hardscape around, I decided to spend more time working on the stand.
I sanded the piece of plywood I made for the rabbeted edges of the inset platform for the tank itself, and just spent a good full day going from 40 grit, to 60, to 120, to 150, to 400, to 600, to 1500 with my simple manual palm sander. All the while, messing around in my head with how I would scape it with a broken beautiful piece of rock I drilled out and burst into two pieces earlier in the day.
I played around with a couple of different stains, including the same one which I used for the side skins. My first run, I tried to keep it pristine, but ended up with the same PROBLEM as the side skins, and saw more of "my floor is growing" in it than what I wanted to see -- contrast.
I went to work, and talked to one of the painters. The Minwax I was looking at kept going back and forth between Red Cherry and Ebony. I wanted it somewhere in both, and my compatriot advised combining them together, and showed me some work he had done by doing so. I bought both the stains, and picked up a wipe-on polycrlic - something, I had never used before.
While my coworker's suggestion was to combine the two, I tried several different combinations on some spare blocks of wood (amazing how those things just build up over time when building something out of the garage), and liked a particular combination and THANKFULLY, had been smart enough to write it down on the same block of wood ( I highly recommend doing this to anyone who wants to find a "perfect stain." )
First, I had to sand off the entire stain I had previously put on and start fresh. It wasn't too bad, and the remnant stayed inside of the dark rings, where I wanted it to be. My main concern was the poly-fill which had been used by the mill to make the plywood look somehow better. It didn't, and the stain is what I was hoping could hide those man-made blemishes.
Now, I would like to go off on a tangent about this inset platform.
The main purpose of the inset platform was always to hide a configuration of coral fluorescing t5s, or LEDs.
I have never cared for lights shining down on a tank when it came time for corals to be appreciated under whatever moonlight configuration would or could make it happen. The only real way around this is to build a canopy right over the tank, and really pay great mind to keeping water levels tight (not too difficult with auto fill systems and overflows), and angling the lights in an effective way.
This makes a less than ideal scenario for rimless tanks, as the entire point of them is to ELIMINATE the canopy, raise the light sources high, and facilitate both operating and maintaining the tank, as well as seeing down into the tank, something completely negated by the desire to hide moonlighting entirely.
So, I dreamed up a concept of illuminating it from below.
I worked on a Freshwater planted concept for a competition which I never got to attend using a couple different man-made materials in order to create an illusion, but NEVER got to implement it in competition due to a terrible scheduling conflict, and this all happened a year ago. I didn't see myself getting the opportunity to compete in this year's competition for another hand at it, and instead of putting all my eggs into one basket, I decided to diversify my concept, and attempt it with corals.
This is where the whole inset platform comes in.
By concealing as many light sources that fit in the platform, my idea was to have all moonlighting occur by radiating into and then out of the tank at night. I had never tried it this way, and I certainly had never tried it with corals (and now, ironically, but designing such a system, I have learned now how to do it with almost any existing tank with relative ease).
None of my existing lights fit into the platform.
I went onto Ebay, and started looking for strip LEDs in the 400 to 450 spectrum, as well as t5h0 setups for the same. I found both, at reasonable prices to test. The strip lights I got for about 10 bucks each, and a single 24" t5ho fixture that would fit right into the front panel (mind you, I've only got about 3 inches of room there with the way I cut the platform). -- Let me interject --
I have built a couple of custom t5ho lighting rigs at work, and single lamp fixtures are difficult to find ballasts for, especially now that the EPA has dipped so dangerously into cross spectrum elimination of the ballasts for almost anything other than legacy products,and finding a single lamp ballast for t5ho, especially at 24", is almost impossible.
So -- going back to a single 24" t5ho fixture off of ebay - It was too good to be true. The fixture came in, and is one of the strangest things I have ever seen. It is a custom lamp that is actually longer than a standard 24" bulb, and it does not have a servicable ballast, nor DESIGNED for removing the lamp. I persisted, and managed to make a work around. I was able to make the fixture take a standard length 24" t5ho, should the existing lamp burn out. Alternatively, I might be able to just build my own once this ballast burns out.
(helios t5-ii. I still don't undertad what the ii means, especially since there is only one lamp)
Last edited:
