55 Gallon Build

[NJAB]

Hello all I recently purchased a 55 Gallon Oceanic aquarium from Craigslist that i will be building up into a reef aquarium. I am currently running a 20 Gallon tall aquarium 24 x 12½ x 17 that's been up and running for a little over a year now with mostly zoa's, mushrooms, torch and frogspawn and at the moment because I lost 3 fish when I moved apartments, only one yellow watchman Goby. But anyways back to the build. I knew I wanted to kept spending moderate (cant have the wife yelling too much haha) so I went to Craigslist and and bought an 55 gallon aquarium with the stand for $50. Next I knew i wanted to drill it, being that I like being hands on I wanted to drill it myself. I looked up the ways to tell if the glass was tempered or not and after thinking I had classified the glass properly i went to drill and blew out the entire back of the aquarium.

Thankfully someone on Craigslist was selling an oceanic which I learned on here was plate glass. So now, so far I successfully drilled my first tank (2) 1" holes and (1) 3/4" hole, here was the very nerve wrecking process:




The last picture is hard to see but there are 3 holes in it now, I also decided on going with the Herbie overflow design, I'm using a black acrylic overflow box and will hopefully be getting my pvc sometime this week I was thinking of going with 1" blue furniture grade schedule 40 pvc only available through bulk reef supply and home depot but both are sold out at the moment I guess it's build season. So once someone restocks I will be getting that for my plumbing, reason I want to get blue is you will be able to see the plumbing from the side of the tank when you walk into the apartment so I figured it would be more aesthetically pleasing to see that then white pvc or gray. this coming weekend I will be painting the back of the aquarium and if i can find any RTV silicone sealer/adhesive (coincidentally Grainger says its out online at our local store) start building my sump which will be a 20 gallon long sump. If you guys have a questions/comments/concerns please ask or state, I am in no way an "expert" so if you notice anything that my be of concern please let me know. Other than that I hope we all have fun along the way. :fish1:

 

[NJAB]

Ran into my first question on my sump I had them cut my glass to 11 7/8" long as the tank is 12" Long 3 pieces didn't fit so I'm going to go tomorrow and ask them to grind them just a tad so they can fit. My question now is if I'm using the momentive 100 series silicone does it expand in the joints i don't want it to blow out the sump glass because 1/8" isn't enough space. So should I have all of them grinded more or just the ones that didn't fit?

 

[NJAB]

Just painted the back of the aquarium black I was going to use Krylon Fusion spray paint but after reading some posts on here on the permanent and non-environmental friendly factor of Krylon spray paint I decided to go with rustoleum black semi gloss latex paint. The end result was really nice in my opinion it completely covered the back in 3 quick coats it was 85 degrees here in El Paso this past weekend, and painting out in the full sun the paint was dry to the touch in no more then 20 minutes between coats. I painted it with the roller shown below and it gave it a smooth finish on the glass but the back looks textured, thought that was kinda of odd but I'm happy i went with the semi gloss as well, because I didn't want it to look shiny like the plastic backgrounds but at the same time I didn't want a matte black look either so I think this was a great in between. This coming week I'm going to be attempting to build my sump, finally got the momentive rtv silicone yesterday so I will be posting more pictures of my build to come.

Everything masked off

Products used

First Coat

close up of the first coat

Final 3rd coat

 

[Pife]

It looks like a good start.