Well, it was a busy evening tonight. After a lot of back and forth and general wishy-washiness the decision has been made.... Cut the tank, comission a stand by a Master Welder, and see if the old sump is gonna leak!
So... the new plan is to cut a notch in this tank and build an external overflow which will be plumbed to the old sump from my 110. This should double my water volume and alow me to take salvaging bits to the extreme. I plan on pressing my Vertex In-180 into service as the skimmer... that should bump my bio-capacity up to about 50 fish I think... How many tangs do you think I could fit in here?
In all seriousness though, I am a little concerned about overskimming and was planning on just running the skimmer 8 hours a day or so, any thoughts?
Now for some pic's to interrupt all this talking!
First off, after a couple of trial runs with the dremel and diamond bit I felt ready to tackle the tank. Here it is ready to go in the shop... Notice the super high-tech lighting system I rigged to illuminate my work!! One thing I did do which was neat was instead of having a dam to hold the water, I just pumped the water out of a 5 gallon pail and used paper towels and duct tape to channel it back into the bucket. This kept the cut clean and cool in shallow water.
This next one is just a break I took about 1/3 of the way through. It probably took me a lot longer to do then it had to but I figured easy does it for my first glass carving experience. You can see how the water is just flowing over the area to be cut, it took a little trial and error to set my drain channel up properly but only about half of the bucket ended up on the floor when it was all said and done (good thing I didn't try this in the kitchen
)
Finally, the cut's all done. Roughly 8 inches in length and a little over an inch deep. Nobody will mistake this for a job done by a pro but overall I'm pretty happy with my first attempt!
So... I'm a little concerned about the stress on the back panel when I add the overflow box and was considering adding a mini eurobrace, say 1/4"thick by 1/2" x36" just to add a little beef to the back. The whole tank is 1/4" glass and that's what I have planned for the overflow, it'll be 10" wide by 4" front to back and say another 10" top to bottom with 1" bulkheads setup for a herbie. Any thoughts on the necessity of the Euro-brace?
Cheers!