Here they are:

12" cube sitting on 5 kockey pucks

http://www.canreef.com/photopost/dat...8505121523.JPG



stuff

http://www.canreef.com/photopost/dat...8505121528.JPG



yet another mantis shot

http://www.canreef.com/photopost/dat...8505121512.JPG



How it looks on my desk

http://www.canreef.com/photopost/dat...8505121530.JPG


What do you think?

- Chad

That looks great Chad!!
I love the larger cube.. :biggrin:

Ryan,
Thanks brother. Ike looks a lot more comfortable with the extra space as well...

- Chad

Looks great, Chad. What do you stare at more, your monitor or the tank?

Oh, if you get tired of the "Mantis Night in Canada" stand, send me some measurements and I could make a skirt for you at the shop.

Cap'n,
Thank you very much for the offer. I will definitely contact you about that, probably when I bring the tank home.

Cheers


Here is a link to the new video I just made:

:http://www.truenorthreef.com/newcube.wmv

that movie was great. i don't know if its because i am new to the whole reef thing but i would never thing that a mantis shrimp would have that much personality. Ike is a funny little ****. again great movie, and great set up.
ADAM

Adam,
Thanks, I'm glad you liked it. It was a big surprise to me also to see how much personality a mantis shrimp has. Ike probably couldn't be any more alien or different from a dog but for some reason, that's what he most reminds me of...

- Chad

Ike hadn't been fed for a few days and was getting hungry so yesterday I picked up 5 small hermit crabs and dropped them into the tank. Ike grabbed one right away and pulled it into his cave but after only a couple hits, he was already back out grabbing the next one. Before I knew it, all but one (one got away) were gone. I looked inside his cave and saw that all four hermit crabs were placed side by side upside down so that their openings were facing up instead of down. Ike was hanging motionless from the ceiling and staring right inside the shell openings. It looked like he was just waiting for one of the hermit crabs to come out and try and right itself. I watched this for about a minute and Ike was perfectly still the whole time. I couldn't stick around because I had to get home but I am looking forward to what I find when I get back on Monday.

At first I thought that Ike was too lazy to do any smashing and was just going to wait them out. After I posted in the mantis forum on Reef Central, another g. smithii keeper told me that he just observed the same thing when he put 10 blue legs in his tank. That got me thinking about a possible explaination for this behavior. 10 blue legs is a lot to feed, and 5 is the most that I have ever put in the tank at one time...
Perhaps this is a "food storage" mechanism that the mantis has developed. When I feed him a couple crabs, he busts them open and eats them. Maybe when you feed them more crabs than they can eat at once, they imobilize them on their backs to keep them until it is time to eat again. Maybe in the ocean, if they let a meal get away just because they weren't hungry at the time, they wouldn't be able to guarantee when the next meal would come along...
What do you think, does that sound possible?

- Chad

nano tank
 

how did you hook up your canister filter to the bottom of your tank?

Stinky,
Hi. I connected the cannister filter to the bottom of the tank like this:
holes drilled with bulkheads - bulkheads fitted with hosebarb fittings - filter lines slid onto hosebarbs. Easy peasy.
Cheers,

- Chad

how do you control it from overflowing or draining ,does it just equal its self out?

Thanks for your help:biggrin:

Stinky,
You're welcome!



Crabs,
It is a sealed cannister filter, not a sump. The intake and return lines are both plumbed to the bottom of the tank so there is no other water in the system to overflow anything and nowhere else for the water to go, so no worries about draining either. It is baisically a closed loop... with a chaeto fuge ( : Hope this makes sense.

- Chad

Updated photos:


Front

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e9.../060126047.jpg



Back

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e9.../060126065.jpg



Closeups

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e9.../060126053.jpg


http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e9.../060126057.jpg




Hope you enjoy!

- Chad

fish's new cube..............
 

Amazing. Your cubes are works of art Chad............excellent photographs and video's
Would be great if you had the time to do a little schematic showing hook up ,type of filter ,impeller mod etc.,Or do I recall you showing this on a previous thread ?
I actually quite like the hockey puck look,very minimalist does not distract the eye from the tank.
Keep up the innovations just gets better and better
.............Dave.

That looks great. I really like that frogspawn, it fills the space very nicely. And look at the polyp extension on that acro.. wow.. in a nano that small especially.. nice to see.

Looks great.

Wood carver,
Thank you! I like your idea of doing up a schematic with all the stats. Unfortunately, I am not very well versed in any autocad or drawing programs. I'll see what I can whip up....

- Chad

You're right, that frogspawn probably would even fit in my 2gal anymore - it was already touching two panes of glass before I made the switch ( :

- Chad

A couple more photos:



Ike poseing for the camera


http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e9...919/mantis.jpg




And stalking an unsuspecting hermit crab


http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e9...19/mantis2.jpg



Cheers everyone.

- Chad

And here's a few more pics after I changed the sandbed today:



http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e9.../060225036.jpg




http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e9.../060225030.jpg




http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e9.../060225022.jpg




http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e9.../060225023.jpg




- Chad

can you post pics of whats under your tank?

thanks

I'll hunt around. Watch my videos though, they have some clips of the equipment. After that you can let me know what you'd like to see more of.

- Chad

That's a great looking nano! I love the lighting. Do you have more info on that?
Chris

Thanks Chris!
The lighting is a 70w metal halide with a 20k bulb. I bought the ballast, reflector, and bulb and then wired it into a halogen desklamp. I took these photos while I was gutting the desklamp and bolting in the retrofit:


http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e9...ightstages.jpg



- Chad

how much does it cost for a cube to be made? $$20-50??

well i just had a custom cube made...check out my pics in nano reef, and mine cost more then that...starfire is expensive...

looks great! but lets say i dont use that glass and i settle for saphire glass.. or a low iron glass.. somthing that will not cost an arm and a leg.. what $$ would i be looking at?

looks like a little zen mountain setup :)

i think it might have looked quite neat if the sand was black....
i remeber reading about a guy who loved his white sand, the only way he kept it like that was to replace it all...yes all every month....was like a 500 gallon or something like that...rich european....

Thanks. I have thought about black sand before too - just not sure how it would look...
The aragonite is pretty cheap to replace every 4 or 5 months... I only use a cup or so and I'm still on my original bag.

- Chad

It is all the same glass, saphire/starfire etc. just different brand names for low iron glass. My tank cost about $200 but some of that expense was for polishing as well.

- Chad

yikes.... $$200 for a foot cube... id rather buy a crystal vase for 20 and get the same effect only alot cheaper... better yet a free large glass jar from work...

wow, i never realized how much of a good deal i got on my tank..

i've got to keep up with keeping the glass crystal clear now with everyday cleaning ;)

Haha... except you can't drill crystal and any glass jar you use will be riddled with imperfections and distortions. If you think that's expensive, you should see what the shop would have charged me if I didn't already know a couple of the guys working there. They charge $1 per inch for polishing glass edges. My polishing cost alone on the tank would have been $240 (12" per side x four sides per pane x five panes). This time around I had the shop drill the bulkheads for me (saved me some time)that cost about $10-$15 per hole and then the bulkheads themselves are $5-$10 each.
I'm sure anyone could make a cheaper cube - but don't make the mistake of thinking that just because you have a tank, you have "the same effect". ( :

Good luck,
- Chad

Yesterday I brought the tank home from the office. I put it on the bookshelf in the kitchen but I am still looking around for a better piece of furniture so that I can keep the 360degree visibility. The topoff sits on the left of the bookshelf and the cannister filter is to the right.




http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e9.../060427051.jpg






As seen from my chair at the dinner table:

http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e9.../060427053.jpg



Enjoy,

- Chad

I thought you were selling this bad boy Chad?

Ryan,
Hey dude. That is the plan but there are a couple components that no one wants. If it doesn't all sell, I will probably just hold on to it...

- Chad

how much would be selling this setup for?

I'm interested to know as well.

Just curious...