DIY Rimless Starphire and Stainless Kiddy Pool (PICS!)

[liveforphysics]

Hi guys, I don’t often post here, but I have a project that I think people may enjoy seeing. I had a 90gal SPS/mixed reef (plus a few other tanks). I was running out of room for corals, and I was moving into a house, so I wanted to take the opertunity to make my dream tank. After many years and many different tank setups, I had decided on a few special requirements for my dream tank to have. So, here is the 90gal I was using. It was quite a poor setup, and I really hated how I put the tank together.


I wanted the tank to be large. 6’ x 4’ was the original plan.

No acrylic. I’ve played the acrylic game, and I always loved how they looked for about 2-3months before I covered them in scratches. I wanted a tank that could last me a lifetime and still look good.

No center brace or euro braceing. It certianly works to add stregnth to a tank, but I just hated trying to bend my arm around the braces when I was pulling in and out corals. I wanted a tank that had very open acess.

No tall tanks! I really didn’t like my 27” tall tank! Getting my armpit soaked while on my tippy toes (if even that would let me reach!) anytime I needed to do something was not my idea of a good time at all. Plus, I always felt like a tool for wasting so much light energy just getting light to the bottom area. My aquascaping always made me feel like I was working to make a shorter tank by making a huge pile of rocks in the bottom of it to act as a raised bottom.

I didn’t want to see powerheads or any equipment or cords going in or out of the tank.

I didn’t want to have a canopy, and I wanted to be able to get the lights completely out of the way in less than 5 seconds when I wanted to play in the tank. Definitely sick of bumping my head and shoulders on reflectors and nonsense.

The flow must simulate wave action, use very little energy, and be extremely powerful.

The tank must be whisper quiet. I want to be able to have a quiet conversation without it sounding like I’m talking over a flushing toilet.

The tank must be very strong. I had an acrylic tank I built crack on the brace, and I’ve had 2 glass tanks that I built loose a seam. Thank god I was home for each incident, and managed to relocate live stock to a different tank! I wanted this tank to be something I would never worry about failing.

I hated the idea of drilling glass, or drilling the bottom of any clear material on the bottom of a tank, and I really didn’t want to play the tubes over the top or through the side game. I decided that thick many layer plywood would be the best possible material for the bottom of my tank.

So, trying to reach all of these goals, I set aside $5,000 as my budget, and got started.

First, to make the tank be very strong and rimless, I decided I would make a metal frame for the glass to sit in. I decided to use 304 stainless steel for the frame, and I bought it and cut the pieces and layed it all out at 6’x4’. This looked great to me, but when my girlfriend saw it, she didn’t think having a 6’x4’ monster in her living room would be nearly as neat as I did, so we ended up battling until she agreeed to a 58”x45” tank. Don’t ask me why she wouldn’t let me bring that width up to an even 4’… women are not creatures to be reasoned with…

So, here goes take 2 of cutting and laying out the pieces of the now shrunken frame size.

A little shot of a weld. Not too bad for a vertical weld with stick rod

Here is a shot of a finished corner. I went for a brushed stainless finish because its easy. I may polish it sometime in the future, but I don’t want it being too reflective.

[liveforphysics]

Next, I needed to drill the holes in the bottom of the tank frame to lock in the plywood. I ended up having around 60-70 screws I think, and I counter sunk each one to completely tuck the head flush with the frame. After this much stainless drilling, I was definitely sick of working with stainless.
This is my “I’m never drilling stainless again face”


6 drill bits and 3 counter sink tools later, the bottom of the tank was ready to be clamped in place. I routered a shoulder in the plywood to sit down in the frame a bit and make it self centering.


Now the bottom of the tank was screwed into place, and it was time to layout where the plumbing would go so I could design the supports of the stand to not causeing interference problems with how I wanted to plumb the tank. (BTW- the 1969 datsun 510 in that picture has a full honda s2000 drivetrain swapped into it, death on wheels )


Next I built the structural part of the aquarium stand. Structural wood work is a cakewalk, and I had this sucker thrown together in about and hour. Finish carpenter work is something very difficult! I knew that would come later.



I ordered the glass for the tank. The front and 2 sides are starphire in ½”. The back that faces the wall is standard ½” float glass. The top edges have a full polished pencil grind on them.

Now, during the time I was waiting for the glass to arive, I thought I would be pretty clever and take some highspeed photos of the cluster on my GSX-R 1000… Long story short, all I have of that camera is the wrist strap…  I first stopped taking pictures entirely, then decided to stoop to the level of using my phone camera just to have some photo records of the project… I’m currently waiting on a cannon 30D to appear at the right price, so quality photos should re-appear soon. For now, I guess just grit your teeth and cringe through the cell phone pics if you wish to continue.

The glass was cut, and it amazingly all fit in my tiny Honda Insight when I picked it up. Starphire looks so much more beautiful than the normal glass piece, it really made me happy that I spent the extra money.
I had a friend who happens to be a research and development chemical engineer make me a single molicule poly-urea coating free of VOCs. The coating has 600% stretch, and we applied it at a thickness of 120mils. He claims this coating will be absolutely indestructable for this application, and after trying to damage the material I played with in a test pour, I have to agree this stuff is out of this world! Visualize the strongest truck bed liner material on earth, only able to stretch if needed, and about 8 times the thickness of a truck bed liner. I wasn’t able to stab, hack, slash or bash with a hammer through this coating on a test scrap of plywood, and it had only been setup for around 1 hour!!! It was easy to work with and had no odors during the application and bonds to the glass like you wouldn’t believe. A few drips that got onto the glass required clamping a razor blade with visegrips, and tapping the visegrips with a hammer to slowly get it off the glass! The bad news is that the coating was around $250 for the materials alone He did tell me he could make it for me again if I wanted more.

So, fast forward here to me breaking up with that girlfriend, moving from Tacoma Washington to Seatac Washington, and getting desprate enough for pictures that I resorted to the cell phone camera again.

Here is a terrible blurry shot of the tank with the bulkheads, coating and glass installed.


I had played with eductor nozzles before, and found them to be an absolute no brainer requirement for any large reef. This actually isn’t even all of them… I think 4 were still sitting in the tank when I took this shot…

[liveforphysics]

Here is a picture of the tank before any of the plumbing was started.


And the layout of the plumbing begins… Plumbing is very easy work, but plumbing overhead for many many hours gets quite tiresome…

I had made a rule with this tank plumbing. Absolutely everything must be able to be isolated by a valve, and absolutely every part must be able to quickly and easily detache. This made plumbing about 10 times harder and more expensive than the way I had always plumbed tanks in the past, but if I ever get a leak somewhere I’m thinking I will be glad I made it this way.

More random plumbing progress pictures…




Here it’s beginning to get closer to being finished. You can begin to see the complexity of the plumbing involved here.


Here we go with it’s first plumbing and leak down test. I had lots of lots of work to do finding the ideal location for each piece of gear to tuck into a happy home


Cord management was also a bit of an issue to get routed… Used 2 full rolls of lable maker tape! Now every single cord and plug has a label.


Here we go with a very rushed take down of the 90gal display and 2 55gal displays and nano that I had in my old appartment and dumped into this tank. I had all ready paid 2 months of rent at that appartment for the sole purpose of holding my aquariums, and didn’t really like the idea of making it 3 months… In the long run, I actually lost so many corals due to some very lame problems related to the move, I think just paying another month of rent would have been a better option.


What about this wave action I wanted? Well, I have it! And it meets my silent and energy efficient needs.
I replaced the motor on the baraccuda with a 3 phase 230v motor rather than the single phase 110v motor it came with. With a 3-phase motor, it can be controlled very well with a VFD (variable frequency drive). I programmed the VFD to spend 5 seconds to slowly ramp up to full RPM (60hz, or 1800rpm) from 10hz (around 300rpm). It does this very smoothly, and I have a solid state timer block with triggers this event on whatever time interval I set the period for. Right now I’ve been using 8 seconds, but I’ve tried a variety of wave intervals, and 8 seems to look pretty natural. I also found that I couldn’t even position the 16 eductor nozzles in a way which didn’t blast water out of the tank if the pump was permitted to reach full RPM, so I had to program the speed back down to around 54hz, which is still absolute insanity. The substrate I’m using is very course chunks of crushed coral, and if I don’t keep the nozzles tipped just right, it snowstorms the whole tank on each wave interval. The fish actually anticipate the next coming wave and duck into little nooks and crannys right before it hits. It reminds me of what I see on natural reefs.
Here is some pictures dorking around getting the VFD to drive the pump to make waves.


I also ported the housings of the pump, as I found the casting have loads of casting flash and perhaps even poor center housing alignment. I ended up buying 2 new complete sequence pump heads before I was happy. Here is a gallery of pump related stuff for anyone who cares. http://www.ejlin.com/gallery/view_al...umName=album41

So, here is a shot with some fairly random piles of live stock thrown together. The goal was to try to get things to not be covered by sand, and to not sting eachother to death. That actually didn’t work out as well as I hoped, and I need to take time to begin aquascaping badly.


I promise to take a real camera home from work today and update the thread with some real photos rather than the cellphone nonsense. I will include some pictures of the calcium and ozone systems, and finished wire management system and plumbing.

Best Wishes, and I hope you enjoy this long read. I had a lot of fun building this tank, and I hope I can share some of that with you.
-Luke

[shouldabenacowboy]

Can't wait to see the "real" pictures

But, what you have so far looks pretty good. Keep the pic's a coming...

SBC

[BeanAnimal]

Very nice work. Keep us posted on ther tanks progress.

[Der_Iron_Chef]

Wow. Nice work. Did you stay within your 5K budget?!

What kind of overflow do you have there? Lighting?

Looks great so far!

[fry_school101]

*snif* it's so beautiful! . . . except for the wiring mate, that's a mess! Looking forward to the pics!

[BeanAnimal]

What would you rate the noise level from the modified pump? How about when it cycles through the rpm range?

[8BALL_99]

looking good....lol wow I hope you never have a leak

[stugray]

Did you pay to have three phase power installed?
Most residential installations dont have 3 phase.

Stu

[happyface888]

Thats really nice.

[lavith]

very nice

[djohnston]

WOW! Great job!

[liveforphysics]

As far as the wireing mess goes, try to keep in mind that was just during the equipment testing and locating phase. It looks quite a bit different now.

As far as the 3 phase power thing goes, I do not have 3 phase service at my house. This is where the beauty of the VFD comes in. For the non-EE geeky types, just ignore these next few lines. 110v single phase enters the VFD and runs right into a 2.5:1 ratio step-up transformer. It then passes to a full wave bridge with a bank of caps to make a DC power source at around 300v. This power source is connected to an H bridge of SCR's or FETs. The transistors are switched by the signal from the microprocessor which tells it how to create the phasing and frequency to simulate sine waves at the desired frequencys and phases to cause the motor to do anything you wish it to do. It also controls voltage and current to be whatever you wish, and i used an exponential curve for power vs frequency to match the true pumping work needs, as flow varies at the square of RPM in a centripital type pump. Just for the folks who are into meaningless flow numbers, it should be pushing roughly 21,000gph at the peak of the wave pulse. This is of course due to the eductor 4.9:1 boosting ratio for my flowrate and head. My tank was not able to handle the flow of full RPM, so I had to drop frequency to 54hz, which in turn dropped flowrate by around 20%. I think I will actually need to drop it back by around another 10% at least.

I'm going to get home and snap some pictures with a decent camera from work to share with you folks now.

Best Wishes,
-Luke

[BeanAnimal]

I have messed with the yaskawa drives before... never had a chance to mess with the single phase unit like you have. Though, I hear it works well and your project appears to confirm that.

I have been tempted to purchase one several times, but resign myself to the fact that it would be one more piece of equipment bound for the never finished project shelf. Noise is also always a concern as my tank is adjoined to my home theater.

[liveforphysics]

As far as the performance of the VFD wave system goes, I will confirm your assumption that it works well.

Over the years I've used SeaSwirls, Hayward motorized ball valves, OceansMotions, Wavy Seas, and a variety of different powerhead controller devices.

The VFD drive wave motion is not even in the same world. The last setup used an OceansMotions, and I gave the whole setup away after I saw how this performed. I still have 3 hayward ball valves and sea swirls and other junk laying in my shop now, and it all seems so silly to play with after seeing how the VFD makes waves.

It was a little on the pricey side, but I know that I could never go back.

I took a whole bunch of pictures, including some IR images of the pumps and equipment running. I will be uploading them ASAP.

Best Wishes,
-Luke

[liveforphysics]

Finally some non-phone camera pictures again!


Here is a shot from the side. It appears so little in the picture! Seems quite different when you are next to it.



Here is a recent shot of under one side of the stand.



Here is a shot of under the other side of the tank.



This is an IR picture of the sequence fitted with a 3-phase motor.



Here is a picture of the normal sequence dart running under a light head.


Here is a IR picture of the VFD running.

[liveforphysics]

Here is a picture from the small end of the tank.



Wireing after cleaning things up.



Here is an IR image of the wireing going into the ReefKeeper2 control strip. I love IR for seeing wireing.



Here is another of the wireing.



Nice cool plugs! It isn't hard to see where the transistors to switch the relays are located in that pH/ORP controller.

[JCTewks]

Nice set up!! I wish I had toys as cool as IR cameras to play with

[tanya72806]

very impressive

[liveforphysics]

This is the piviot for the frame which holds my lighting.



This is how the lights sit over the tank.



Here is how they rotate off to the side and out of the way.





When the lights are all the way over to the side, I can squeeze between the tank and the lights to give me access to this side of the tank.



My poor tank has "new tank syndrome" so badly right now that it breaks my heart to look inside. I had so many RTN'd skeletons after the move, I filled my fuge and Ca Reactor with them. This is the second time a move has hammered my SPS population...

[liveforphysics]

This is a shot from the side of the inlet for my VFD wave making closed loop. I wanted a large enough inlet area that sucking fish or animals into it would not be a concern. It's allready been tested by an RTBA who walked right across it while running and had no issues getting sucked against it.

When I finish the rockwork it will be better covered.

Shot from the top.



Shot from the side looking in.




It took quite a bit of tuning things, but I've got the tank to meet my noise goals of whisper quiet.

With the doors closed on the stand, you have to really listen hard to hear a gentle tinkle of water moving in the sump. The entire closed loop VFD wave system is entirely silent.

[liveforphysics]

Thank you for all the kind words and feedback!

If anyone has any questions or desires pictures of specific parts, let me know and I will take them.

Best Wishes to All,
-Luke

[sanosuke]

NIce setup? Where did you get the glass from?

[liveforphysics]

I called around to local glass shops. I quickly found that they all just ordered it pre-cut with ground and polished edge from the same wholesale shop, so I went with the cheapest shop. I paid something like $225 per long side, $150 for the front piece, and $70 for the back pannel to be cut from non-starphire glass.

The starphire was certianly worth it to me. After cleaning the glass, I actually bump my hand or face into it when I'm looking closely into the tank. It give the illusion the fish are floating in the living room I've never had the same feeling from my acrylic tanks.

Sadly, I put a pretty deep scratch into it while moving the tank down the steps outside... Can't just be polished out like acrylic could be Fortunately, if found it seems really difficult to scratch from normal tank related work.