33 gallon cobbled together!

[Slick Fork]

So much for getting out of the hobby for a while.... 6 months after I shut my 110 down I'm really starting to miss it so I think I'm going to stick a toe back into the water!

My 110 is still available if anyone is looking to buy it, I'd set it up but being on a well for our water I found keeping the water quality optimal is damn near impossible. Plus, we're trying to sell our house and moving a 33 is a HECK of a lot easier then moving everything out of the 110!

Here's my existing equipment list, all of it just gathering dust in my basement right now...

Standard 33 gallon tank and stand
Profilux PlusII Controller
Flow & Filtration
Aquaclear 110 and 500
Koralia 3&4 (sneaking suspicion that the 4 is toast)
Tunze 6045, 6055
Tunze Nano Wavebox

Lighting
4x39 watt Tek T5 fixture
OR
175 15k on an electronic ballast with a reef optik 2 reflector
Plus whatever fixture I decide on will get the profilux LED moonlight stick added!

Of course I've got a few heaters kicking around
Some sand and rock (all "air cured")

Plus anything I want to pirate off of the 110 setup including sump and a vertex in 180 skimmer. I played around with the idea of drilling the 33 and adding a 55 gallon sump with the vertex skimmer but... I figure I'll spend $300+ building a new stand, buying the drill bit, paying for plumbing parts etc. So right now I'm thinking I'd rather spend the money on livestock.

My goals and criteria for this tank are:

• cheap and simple (I know that both of these are relative but as a student again, I don't have a lot of money to blow on hardware)
  Diverse
  Did I say Cheap already?

I don't have any solid plans for livestock right now and am open to suggestions. Possibly some attractive macro-algae with LPS and Zoanthids, no ideas on fish right now but I really like gobies and shrimp.
Unless I drill the tank, this one will be skimmerless with nutrient export happening via macro algae and water changes so keep that in mind when suggesting different things.

I'll try to do a better job of keeping this build up to date then I did with my last one

[fishytime]

Great to hear man!.....glad your getting back into it......I know all to well atm what you mean about moving a 110.....if I were doin a 33 and I liked shrimp/gobies ....I would do a yasha/pistol, a pair of percs, either a dwarf or pygmy angel then a pseudochromis or dottyback of some sort....and in that order..although that might be an ambitious stocking list for a sumpless/skimmerless tank?....looking forward to seeing what you do

[Slick Fork]

Hey Doug,

Sorry to hear about your crash. I was browsing your "not so budget" thread and really liked the look of some of the gorg's and filter feeders you had in there. Also really liked the large leafy macro, is that Halmidea?

I don't think I'll have to narrow my fish down for quite some time, I've got some air cured live rock for the base and will have to figure out what I want to do for seed rock... I'm really hoping to avoid introducing pests. I'll probably put the tank together this week, so probably mid august before I'm ready for any kind of livestock.

[Slick Fork]

So, set it all up for a freshwater trial run in the living room to see how the noise is with all the powerheads, wavebox etc. going. Wavebox is a little noisy but it hasn't been used for a while so i've left it all running to rinse it off and hope it quites down a little... good news is CHECK OUT MY WAVE


Click for the video
Gotta paint the stand to match the furniture up here or the wife'll kill me

[The Grizz]

That is one sweet wave you have going there Chris . A little bird tells me you are thinking of putting a nice big sump and skimmer on this tank .

[Slick Fork]

Yeah, I'd like to... Unfortunately my buyer for my old lights backed out. Part of my goal with this tank is to do the setup (hardware wise) with almost no fresh money going into it. The joys of being back in school! So, we'll have to see. I'm going to call the glass place on monday to see how much an external overflow will set me back, then figure the stand and the plumbing and see what I can scrape together. It'd kind of suck to build all of this and then have no money for a few showpiece chunks of live-rock and frags!

[Doug]

Good thing you have those end pieces on there with that wave going.

[Slick Fork]

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!

[sharuq1]

Did you sell your big tank? What kind of fish are you planning on putting in this one?

[Slick Fork]

still no firm plans on how to stock this one yet, a goby or two for sure. I think I'd kinda like a whole bunch of tiny fish darting around and being active rather then a few larger ones