A few weeks, quickly turned into a few months as work and life got in the way.
After trying unsuccessfully to wrangle enough people together to get this moved to the basement I made the decision to cut it and re silicon it. Since I had to do all the cleaning and prep work in the garage I figured what the heck, I might as well bevel all the edges. This turned into a great en-devour, as I already had the wet polisher and pads, from doing concrete counter tops, but I really should have chose to do this during the summer, as doing it when snow is on the ground really did suck.
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After three days of being damp, and cold and really ****ed off at myself for foolishly thinking this would be easy, it was done. Now would I do this again, maybe, but on a smaller scale, as I even beveled the eurobracing.
A few more weeks passed before I was able to commit the time to the fun game of assembling the tank, the new overflow arrived, as did the new back panel, as the original was chipped and had a really small overflow. Now I've built smaller tanks before and figured this would scale up, boy was I wrong. I now have a strong dislike for silicon, as it makes a mess, and I much more appreciate those who build tanks with excellent silicon work. Mine holds water, but boy is it not pretty. Now with water in it its not bad, but I'm skill considering doing aluminum trim, covering up all the fancy bevels in order to hide my less then stellar silicon work. What follows is the obligatory "mermaid" shot, but probably not the type that most people would hope for.
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Now while the silicon cures and the equipment arrives, I sill continued to collect live stock and crammed my poor 40 gallon full. My Durasa clam found it was no longer alone when a ReefRaft order arrived at a local vender and two tear drop palau clams arrived in my tank.
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To this were also horded various Acan, Blasto, Torch, Hammer, Zoa and a few others. A trend was developing that this tank indeed was going to be my LPS system, leaving my 150 to be for the SPS critters. Now there are no pictures of my hoarded corals, as I have a few fish that needed a bit extra food to get acclimated and healthy and as a result my frag tank is recovering from a minor hair algae outbreak.
The packages started to arrive from all corners of the globe, in hopes that over the Christmas shut down, I could begin the setup.
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After main struggles and a few missed deadlines, it had functional plumbing, functional lights, and it was wet.
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Now I haven't said finished as its far from it, but I have circulation, heat and light. I have something that resembles a skimmer, as my Lifereef Skimmer jumped off of my work bench while I was cleaning it, still to be determined if I will trust salvaging it or if I will switch to a MRC MR-3R. I also am needing to hook up my remote deep sand bed, as well as plumb in my 90 gallon refugium bio filter display tank thing.
But since it was essentially operational, I added in some new dry rock, as well as add about 50 lbs of live rock from my other system. After this was added I needed something to keep the system going, so I transferred all my fish out of my holding tank, and boy do they enjoy the change of scenery .
Sargassum Trigger
Niger Trigger
Purple Tang
White tail bristletooth Tang
2 Vlamgii Tangs
and that takes us to today.
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Now the tank hasn't been scaped, as I'm still awaiting some branch rock, so its arranged right now just to keep all the live rock exposed to light and to allow flow and hiding spots for the fish. My canary corals, a couple zoas a gold hammer frag and GSP are all doing well so after I scape next week I may start adding in a few more precious gems from the frag tank.
