Making Your Own Tank.

[Craig89]

Hi all im thinking of making my own tank using 10mm acrylic instead of glass. Is this possible. I have found a place that will cut and polish the acrylic for me all i would have to do is use aquarium silicone and stick it together lol. Has anybody got any tips for me .

 

[OldMan47]

You don't bond acrylic with silicone. Acrylic tanks are made by welding the pieces of acrylic to each other with a chemical solvent. The dealer that is ready to sell you the acrylic material should have the bonding material for sale too. Most acrylic tanks of any size also have a partial top on them to brace the front and back walls so that they don't bend under the load of the water. Because acrylic is chemically welded, the tank becomes a single structure, not a bunch of pieces glued together by a separate material like you see in a glass tank using silicone.

 

[TheConstantGrower]

Smooth edges.

Smooth smooth smooth smooth smooth smoooooooooooooooooooooooth. No spurs, no flakes, and evenness, straight cuts.

I too built a tank using acrylic and my own two hands, worth it in the end, but what a load of work. Hopefully you have access to good machinery to cut these pieces because if not , welcome to my world.

You have to make sure every edge is perfect, not near perfect, but perfect, the weldon (number 4 i believe) will not bond to anything less than perfect. sand the edges deburr them. allow in your cuts for the removal of mm's of acrylic by hand.

Get ready for the gauntlet sir. But in the end youll love it, i can promise you that.

 

[AK77]

I made my nano tank from acrylic.

You will need a router and a machined straight edge to ensure clean, straight cuts. If you are making the tank to fit an existing cabinet as I did, then you'll need to machine it yourself with the router and be very precise. If you are planning to build a stand to fit the tank, then I'd suggest you just use the standard pre-machined acrylic, usually available in 1m x 0.5m, 1.5m x 0.5m, 2m x 0.5m sizes, and then just build the stand/cabinet to fit. This will save a lot of acrylic cutting. In fact, you'll only need to machine 2 sides to remove 2cm (to allow for the 2 x 10mm front and rear panels. Apart from that, you'll just need to cut out the top section to form support struts/braces.

As mentioned earlier, you cannot use silicone to join the acrylic together. You will need a solvent weld like weld-on 4 (USA only) or if you reside in the UK, there are a few products that are good substitutes.

The tools I used included the following

Router with straight cutting bit (you might also need a profile cutter bit too)
Metal straight-edge
Jigsaw
Metal rule
Square (adjustable ones are better so that you can set the depth)
G-clamps
Corner clamps
Bandsaw
Circular saw
Press drill / pillar drill
Wet and dry paper
Blow torch
Solvent weld
Needle applicator

I'm sure there were other tools, that escape me at the moment.

 

[TheConstantGrower]

sorry about my first post, i seem to have been out of my mind.

Check out Melev's Reef this guy has sumping down to a fine art, and if you find you just cannot get what you want on your own (which he is more than happy to help you with) he will make and ship one to you. I have seen a few of these up close, they are of amazing quality. I Know its not the building of a tank, but check out the data there on construction, you might find some nice tips, ive used some of his templates and methods in my own acrylic works.


Good luck! (smooth edges)

-TGC