goreefer
New member
For many weeks i have been looking for a sump that would fit under my 29, but I could not find any with the right dimension.
So I decided to build my own.
The dimensions needed to be no wider than 11", about 14" long, and about 12" high. With these dimensions I didn't need to fabricate it from 3/8" Plexiglas, 1/4' would work just fine. I purchased my Plexiglas from Lowes, they carry .22" thick Plexiglas in their glass section.
I cut the pieces to rough size, about a quarter of an inch larger that my final size, and then trimmed the pieces to final size using what I call my ghetto router table. It is simply a piece of plywood that my router was attached too. A simple rip fence was just screwed to the plywood.
It is nothing fancy, but did the job very well.
The job of the router is to give you a nice smooth edge for gluing.
The next step was to glue the pieces together using the "pins method" that can be found here on RC. I used plastic speed squares to hold the panels at 90 degrees. The other thing that I used were two magnetic floats to hold the panels to the square.
I used Weldon #3 for all of the joints.
I let the joints cure for two days and then did a leak test.
Since I was building this sump for myself I also attached an extra holder for the pH probe, a place to keep the thermometer probe and the ground probe in place, and a extra holder for a piece of PVC pipe that I use to prevent a siphon from my ATO.
I'm surprised how easy it was actually to build this.
It fits very snug in the space that I had.
It also gave me about three more gallons of water, which doesn't sound like much, but in a 29 gallon tank that is about ten percent more.
Now what do I need to build?
So I decided to build my own.
The dimensions needed to be no wider than 11", about 14" long, and about 12" high. With these dimensions I didn't need to fabricate it from 3/8" Plexiglas, 1/4' would work just fine. I purchased my Plexiglas from Lowes, they carry .22" thick Plexiglas in their glass section.
I cut the pieces to rough size, about a quarter of an inch larger that my final size, and then trimmed the pieces to final size using what I call my ghetto router table. It is simply a piece of plywood that my router was attached too. A simple rip fence was just screwed to the plywood.
It is nothing fancy, but did the job very well.
The job of the router is to give you a nice smooth edge for gluing.
The next step was to glue the pieces together using the "pins method" that can be found here on RC. I used plastic speed squares to hold the panels at 90 degrees. The other thing that I used were two magnetic floats to hold the panels to the square.
I used Weldon #3 for all of the joints.
I let the joints cure for two days and then did a leak test.
Since I was building this sump for myself I also attached an extra holder for the pH probe, a place to keep the thermometer probe and the ground probe in place, and a extra holder for a piece of PVC pipe that I use to prevent a siphon from my ATO.
I'm surprised how easy it was actually to build this.
It fits very snug in the space that I had.
It also gave me about three more gallons of water, which doesn't sound like much, but in a 29 gallon tank that is about ten percent more.
Now what do I need to build?
Of course, I was not subject to space restrictions in my garage.
