Like I said before it is a cheap easy to work with material. You can rout profiles into it to create all those fancy mouldings, it finishes smooth with almost any paint and little sanding, and built correctly it will do the job of carrying the weight. In the long term though as an aquarium stand, I think it will not stand up as well as a properly finished stand built with plywood and solid wood. Any amount of moisture that penetrates the finish will swell the mdf and make it look terrible, not to mention reduce it strength. I'd like to see what some of those stands look like after five years of use.
I built a welded steel stand to replace an mdf stand once for an office. The mdf stand was nearly ready to collapse under the weight of the tank (it had sagged nearly an inch at the back edge) due to moisture damage. It would have been a huge mess to have had 200 gallons of salt water pouring down from the 8th floor office. I will never build an aquarium stand out of mdf. I'm not tottaly against mdf, I do use it for other applications where I feel it is better suited.
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I retired and got a fixed income but it's broke.
Ed
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50 gallon FOWLR, 10 gallon sump.
130 gallon reef, 20 gallon sump, 10 gallon refugium.
10 gallon quarantine.
60 gallon winter tank for pond fish.
300 gallon pond with waterfall.
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