Prepare for overkill!
You know you're a monster fish keeper when you're building a 510 gallon tank and you know going into it that the tank is just a growout tank! I'm building this tank for my Goliath tiger fish. Everything I do in fish keeping now days is centered on the GATF.
You can see his growout thread here.
Anyway, on to the tank. I used all primo lumber on this thing. The plywood is 3/4 inch cabinet grade oak hardwood. I selected this stuff because it's heavy, solid, straight and almost completely knot free. It's very dense, solid and strong; much better than the pine lumber. For the studs, I went with the best stuff my local Lowes could get, Douglas fir select. Again, very straight, heavy wood.
The actual internal dimensions for this will be 91.5" x 43" x 30" for an actual total of 508.7 gallons, which is 4,243 pounds of JUST water!
As I was designing this thing, I planned for redundancy as often as I could. Every seam on the edges of this tank will be doubly screwed. Screws are drilled in every two inches on most seams. This thing is incredibly solid so far and I'm not done. I'm not taking any chances with 4,000 pounds of water in my living room!
Tomorrow I'm going back to Lowes and I'm gonna get another ten pounds of two inch wood screws and five more pounds of 3.5 inch wood screws and hopefully get back to work.
To the pictures!
The point I was at when I thought to start taking pictures-
Flipped it up to get the bottom firmly buttoned up. Note how there are two screws in the 2x4 that look different. Those are the 3.5 inch screws that I have going into the plywood, next to the screws that go into the other 2x4. That's an example of the type of redundancy I'm talking about. Two of everything.
Once I have some more screws, I'm going to go all around the bottom again, but the inside line of screws will be going into the plywood instead of the 2x4s.
Detail of a corner. I did the same basic thing as I did around the bottom. Note how I continued the line of screws into the 2x4s with the 3.5 inch screws.
The viewing window. I'm considering adding another 2x4 to the top and bottom. I'll see how I feel when I get a bit farther along in construction. To hold the front end lumber in place I'll be using 3.5 inch screws from the 2x4s on both sides through the plywood. The bottom piece will be held in place with a ridiculous amount of two inch wood screws.
Uprights. Spaced one foot on center. Way down the road from now, there will be ten inch lags going into each upright from the top and bottom. There are two rows of two inch wood screws on each upright from the inside that will be on either side of each lag. The lags will also hold the cross braces on the top in place along with four 3.5 inch screws for each cross brace.
The uprights on the backside of the tank.
The two rows of screws mentioned earlier. The on-center mark that's on the top of the tank is where the lags will go.
A good detail of the corner. There is a 2x4 and a 2x6 upright on the other side of this that are also screwed together in two different ways. The corners are being pulled together four different ways, and I don't even have the cross braces on yet.
The final corner of the tank. I ran out of screws so I wasn't able to finish this corner or the last few uprights on the back wall.
Updates as they're available!
You know you're a monster fish keeper when you're building a 510 gallon tank and you know going into it that the tank is just a growout tank! I'm building this tank for my Goliath tiger fish. Everything I do in fish keeping now days is centered on the GATF.
You can see his growout thread here.
Anyway, on to the tank. I used all primo lumber on this thing. The plywood is 3/4 inch cabinet grade oak hardwood. I selected this stuff because it's heavy, solid, straight and almost completely knot free. It's very dense, solid and strong; much better than the pine lumber. For the studs, I went with the best stuff my local Lowes could get, Douglas fir select. Again, very straight, heavy wood.
The actual internal dimensions for this will be 91.5" x 43" x 30" for an actual total of 508.7 gallons, which is 4,243 pounds of JUST water!
As I was designing this thing, I planned for redundancy as often as I could. Every seam on the edges of this tank will be doubly screwed. Screws are drilled in every two inches on most seams. This thing is incredibly solid so far and I'm not done. I'm not taking any chances with 4,000 pounds of water in my living room!
Tomorrow I'm going back to Lowes and I'm gonna get another ten pounds of two inch wood screws and five more pounds of 3.5 inch wood screws and hopefully get back to work.
To the pictures!
The point I was at when I thought to start taking pictures-
Flipped it up to get the bottom firmly buttoned up. Note how there are two screws in the 2x4 that look different. Those are the 3.5 inch screws that I have going into the plywood, next to the screws that go into the other 2x4. That's an example of the type of redundancy I'm talking about. Two of everything.
Once I have some more screws, I'm going to go all around the bottom again, but the inside line of screws will be going into the plywood instead of the 2x4s.
Detail of a corner. I did the same basic thing as I did around the bottom. Note how I continued the line of screws into the 2x4s with the 3.5 inch screws.
The viewing window. I'm considering adding another 2x4 to the top and bottom. I'll see how I feel when I get a bit farther along in construction. To hold the front end lumber in place I'll be using 3.5 inch screws from the 2x4s on both sides through the plywood. The bottom piece will be held in place with a ridiculous amount of two inch wood screws.
Uprights. Spaced one foot on center. Way down the road from now, there will be ten inch lags going into each upright from the top and bottom. There are two rows of two inch wood screws on each upright from the inside that will be on either side of each lag. The lags will also hold the cross braces on the top in place along with four 3.5 inch screws for each cross brace.
The uprights on the backside of the tank.
The two rows of screws mentioned earlier. The on-center mark that's on the top of the tank is where the lags will go.
A good detail of the corner. There is a 2x4 and a 2x6 upright on the other side of this that are also screwed together in two different ways. The corners are being pulled together four different ways, and I don't even have the cross braces on yet.
The final corner of the tank. I ran out of screws so I wasn't able to finish this corner or the last few uprights on the back wall.
Updates as they're available!
