Non digital project fish tank backing

Rhinokey

posted this over at the cichlid forums. project my girl and myself are doing, making a nice show tank for the living room for my 3 giant fishes

http://www.cichlid-forum.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=1011728#1011728

notman

Cool. I like the idea. What are you going to cover it with? Is it safe for the fishies?

Rhinokey

covering it with a few layers of cement, then vinyl cement to seal it, will be plenty safe, theres a sticky thread on these backgrounds on that forum with severla of them made.

Hito

cichlids are cool fish, I had one a long while back, you could hold the fish food above the water and it'll jump up and take it from your hand. It jumped though the lid out of the tank one night and dried up on the floor.

Rhinokey

need a good lid,
i have 2 oscars that are about 8-9 inches, and a foot long pleco, they splash a lot, so without a good lid my apr would be soaked.

Mark Dygert

Looks cool so far! I don't know what kind of size restraints you have but what about doing some foam detail on the outside as well to really help disguise the tank?

What about making it modular so you can change it up later on when you get bored with it? If you did rocks inside and out You could attach both details with magnets that way you're not stuck having to do a major tank overhaul again in a few months when that one detail bugs you, or that one grotto isn't being used.

Rhinokey

you have to glue this down pretty hardcore, it is foam so it realy wants to float up, one common prob with this method is not glueing it good enough and a week or so later a big chunk braks off and floats to the surface. outside of the tank will just be painted black where the foam is visible.

Rhinokey

first layer of concrete on it, updated the main thread

almighty_gir

fix ur UVW's i can see distortion!

looks cool man, should be nice when it's finished

Rhinokey

well tommorow is the day i first get to fill it up with water, here is the tank so far.
and

Rhinokey

tommorow we start the flushing proccess,, filling and emptying till we get the ph leveled out, then add the sand (black coarse grain sand) and white and tan pea gravel. some plants, add in one bristle nose pleco. about 6 tiger barbs a couple of silver dollars about 6 giant danio and my big boy oscars Umaga and Retardo


then the tank will be finished!

Steve Schulze

Looks like you've made your fishies a nice house.

I imagine you've looked into all this, but won't the oscars eat all the little fish?

jaalto

That's looking awesome!

Haha. Retardo looks like the boss of that aquarium.

Rhinokey

the smaller fish are called dithers, mainly to add a lil life to the aquarium and give the oscars some exercise, they are generaly too fast for the oscars to pose much of a threat to.. but ocasionaly one will go missing. but thats life!.

Default

yeah, those oscars are pretty awesome. we have one(used to be two) that's about 5-6 inches across. but out of all the fish we've had, this has been the smartest fish i've ever seen.

nice work on the aquarium, looks great

Emil Mujanovic

You seem to have lost a lot of the hard edges and protruding forms once you layered the cement over the top, which is a shame really because I quite liked your initial shapes.
Aside from that, its looking really nice dude. Looking forward to seeing it once its complete.

-caseyjones

Rhinokey

casey its a completely difrent backing since i had to start over due to poison silicone. i like the look of the first one better, it was sculpted from 2 layers of foam to allow a lot more depth, but the downside was it took up a lot of water room in the tank, and for oscars thats verry important, so i went with a thinner less deep backing the second time

default, both my oscars are about 10 inches long now.

Rhinokey

and


started cycling the tank with 3 tiger barbs, and what was suposed to be 6 giant danios,, but turne dout to be 5 giant danios and one mystery fish

notman

Cool... nice work/effect. Get the oscars in there :P