Oddball - some good ideas there.
I have considered making tanks out of ply/epoxy. And i have had the same thoughts about making a lid with bolts/wing nuts with a gasket to seal against.
Your comments about a "single snorkel with check valve" are interesting. Previously what i did was drill a hole in the lid of the tote and put a bulkhead fitting in the hole and then attached a fitting with thread to screw onto the bulkhead fitting and then attached a length of pipe (plastic of course) to that. The pipe was about 2 feet high above the lid of the tote - i used this pipe to bleed all the air out of the tote and to then fill the pipe a short ways up the pipe - this allowed water to "rush" up the pipe as the car/trailer moved along over bumps. In other words there was somewhere for the water to go as we hit bumps in the road etc. Also i used the same pipe to put the oxygen airline into the tank and down to the oxygen diffuser on the floor of the tank. It worked brilliantly. With the trailer i had at the time i was able to get 2 full totes onboard.
Issues i had were getting fish out. Fish in was easy enough. Fish out was a whole other story. Plus the big big thing against it all - all fish mixed in together - not good, turned out to be really limiting. As i've said, when you have silver females of a species you need to keep the morphs separate. To put it another way, do you want to get male O.Ventralis from Kapampa with females from Chitika? I bet not. Its my responsibility to my clients and end users to do things the right way. Mind you, not that there are many operators out there these days doing things "right". Still, i DO, do things the right way and wont compromise. Packing fish into bags/boxes simply takes too long. The trip is long, the fuel is expensive and i do the driving - wont have it any other way for many reasons i wont go into - suffice to say i do the driving and thats how it will stay. So i cant do trips half loaded with fish because i cant mix them in one tank because the cost of the trip is big. Even though this is a commercial venture i already operate as a non profit ;-). So how to move fish that look very similar to each other without getting them mixed together? How to keep piscivores away from algae grazers? How to keep big Frontosa away from small cyprichromis ?
So taking 8-10 hours to pack boxes then do a 15 hour drive then have to unpack at the other end is an issue and i need to find a way to do this a bit more efficiently.
The issue with ply/epoxy tanks is i cant see the fish. I would like to be able to stop every few hours to go check how the fish are doing. So the answer would seem to be build ply/epoxy with a viewing window - and i have considered this.
I am just wondering if the acrylic approach makes more sense or not. The plan would be to draw it up (once i have a plan that is) and get it all cut on a water jet (in the USA) then shipped in pieces and assembled on this side. Water jet does PRECISION cutting to within a thousandth of an inch.
I've given this a lot of thought - there are many requirements to satisfy. I think a deeper tank partitioned into "levels" that run the horizontal length of the tank are the way to go. The beauty of acrylic is that it can be cut to any shape and glued together and the joints are uber strong. So lots of flexibility on how to design the tank. Not sure of the weight of ply/epoxy compared to acrylic though. As well i worry about bumpy roads and epoxy. Will this cause stress cracks over time? I will be building a custom trailer for this. It will be built out of aluminum to keep overall weight down. I want to have as much capacity weight wise to carry water - not steel trailer or heavy tanks taking up valuable GVM.
Coming up with the plan is the issue. So many ways it "could" be done.
As the saying goes, "two heads are better then one" hence throwing it out there. Someone may have the perfect idea. You don't know if you don't ask. Right?
here a picture of my tanks..
http://www.monsterfishkeepers.com/forums/showthread.php?456034-Bloat-Causes-Cures-and-BIG-Myths
