I would first like to thank Wayne, Wayne’s daughter and Norm in helping me load this beast into my suburban. 

I did not take pictures of the tank, stand, canopy, plumbing and motor before I started cleanup.  However, I am going to start posting some pictures and what I plan on doing with the various items.

I will start with a couple that I took before I left work this morning.  I had to edit them in Photoshop CS2 in order to get the size down from 5MB each to roughly 500-600kb.

Just for the sake of this article I used a Nikon D-50 with a VR tele lens 10-80 1.8f.  All pictures will be 1024X768 pixel count.

Glass-Holes.com OverFlow (Semi-Cleaned) Shot.

ReefFlo - HammerHead



StandBefore any prep work done.




Stand after a whole day of standing the gloss coating off (10/17/2009).  This took me from 10:00 A.M. until 6:00 P.M. I only took a 20 min break for lunch.  I was so sore when I went to bed, I thought I was goig to die.  I will not be using the old doors or be replacing the bottom.  I'm goign to leave it an open space from the bottom of the tank to the floor.  I want the ability of being able to wick up any spilt water anywhere around the stand.  I believe that I will be painting the stand and canopy oil base white.  I am not sure yet but I might make a shell that can be slid in and out from the stand.
Since I've had the stand home, in the car-port it is still wet and I've had it for a week.  After I took the finish off I brought into the house so it would be in a controlled enviroment and hopefully dry out.  I'm going to give it 2 weeks before I start to prime the stand and get it ready for the final finish.










180 Tank (Seni-Cleaned).  Me and my son worked on the aquarium a lot today (10/18/2009).  We steelwooled the top of the tank to get off all of the oxidation from the saltwater and lights that sat over the tank over the years.  With a closer inspection of the tank durring this clean process I discovered that this tank is an AllGlass manufactured on December 28 of 1994.  Here are some of the shot this afternoon.
I am planning on painting the outside back of the tank black with enamel high-gloss paint so I am not worried about getting the back inside of the tank spotless.






This is a picture where it going to reside after it is all said and done.
This oak table and chairs are going to get moved out as soon as I get the tank on the stand.  We really don't need it because we have a largeer table in our other dining area.
The wall to the right is where all my plumbing it going and is our laundry room.  There will be no powerheads or anyother noise makers near or around the DT tank.



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After much debate with myself and talking to a few people I plan on redoing the silicone webbing on the inside of the tank.  The structure silicone that actually holds the tank together looks good but since this tank is about 15 years old I figured that I would go ahead and get this out of the way so I can have a least anohter 5 years of worry free, no questions asked, wether or not it would be leak free.
I plan on over buying most of the components in the system and more than likely upgrade to a 400+ gallon system in that aloted time.

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Ok.  I have been working on this project every waking moment when I'm not at work.  It is starting to come together.

I primed and painted the stand, doors and the canopy.  I also re-webbed the tank, painted the back black and installed the bulk-heads in the overflow.

In the Picture above, showing the shot of the over-flow, I siliconed the overflow to the tank.  I then installed the bulkheads.  It took me about 30 mins to get the nuts on the bulkheads as tight as I wanted the because the silicone was easing out the sides and bottom of the overflow as I was tightening the bulkheads down.   There is no way for water to leak around these bulkheads.

I am very happy how the webbing came out.  I masked all the joints out with painters (blue) masking tape. I then put the silicone on then removed the tape.  It took me about an hour and a half to mask everything out.  It took me about 15 mins to silicone the tank.  All in all it took about 18 hours to re-web the tank including removing the old silicone and making sure all the seams were clean before applying the new silicone.

Here are some shots of the stand, canpoy, the T5 retro's and my 250 MH retro's.  I'm not sure but I might need to put me another 250 MH retro because of the display tank having 2 braces across the top.  I won't fully know until I get the tank on the stand and turn the lights on.

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11/02/2009

Tonight I wired all the lights into the canopy and installed the piano henge.  I used all stainless steel parts to keep oxidation down and tested all the lighting.  Everything in the canopy is 100% ready to go.  I mounted the T5 ballast in the back of the canopy.  However, I mounted the IceCap MH ballast's on the back-end top of the canopy.  I have the MH ballasts sitting on top of 4 stainless steel nuts, one on each corner of the ballast, to keep it suspended so that air could freely pass all around them.  Since wood is an insulator I did not want the bottom of the ballast to be touching the canopy.  I might purchase some heat sinks for them but at this point I'm not that worried about it.

I am ready for the tank to go on the stand but I'm going to wait to place the canopy on it this weekend so the paint can harden a bit more.

I  have been pondering that I might purchase all new plumbing for the fact that I want grey or black pipe.  I don't like the way white PVC pipe looks, personally.  I know that grey or black schedule 40 is a little more expensive so I have also thinking about just buying white PVC and painting it high gloss black.

I have also thought about buying schedule 80 for the added strength but since only skimmers uses high pressure pumps I have almost opted out of that idea, mainly due to the fact that schedule 80 PVC's ID is smaller than 40 and I don't want any restrictions on the Reef-Flo Hammerhead pump for my closed loop.

I could not believe the price of a  stainless steel piano henge.  The price is outrageous.  Unless you are a stickler, like myself, don't bother.  However, I hate oxidation so the price didn't really matter.

Anyway, enough of my blabbering, here are some more pictures of what I accomplished tonight.