Haha yeah… polyester resin, fiberglass and glass windows will always be the most affordable option for large builds. Glass prices are gettin crazy these days tho also. Materials are all over the place right now. Back in 09’ when i did my build i used polypropylene as it was 1/3 the price of acrylic. Today its about equal.
i refurbish boats as a side job. here its cheaper for that 4x8 sheet of acrylic and a container of weld on then it is for a pail of polyester resin. not including the chop mat and supplies to lay it. like mixing containers and brushes. also not including the secondary cost of hardener. i also find the fumes from polyester resin far worse and longer standing then say methylene chloride or weldon 16. the other side to that comparison is that fiberglass is not totally water proof. moisture does pass through polyester resin when cured. its just an extremely slow rate. thats why its reccomended to coat a tank in an epoxy paint over the fiberglass and wood. pond armor is ridiculously expensive right now.
Crazy u can get acrylic cheaper than poly rez… i believe it tho. Materials are all over the place depending on location.
jjohnwm
acrylic solvents are pretty low voc and also evaporate so their pretty safe to work with and have mild fumes.
), and it took many weeks of searching and calling to find it. The fumes were unbelievable! By comparison, the stuff available today is pretty inoffensive...but still dangerous, of course.there are certainly some failure concerns with acrylic. however they arent really that common. in fact it was wedsnday13 who explained to me the proper way to support the bottom pannel of acrylic. a glass tank or a well built plywood tank would only need the four corners supported for the most part. an acrylic tank needs the entire bottom supported. he steered me away from potentially having the bottom of the acrylic tank blow out.I must admit that the main reason why I personally am such a fan of plywood is simply the fact that all my experience is with that type of tank construction. Even when I first started building plywood tanks (30-ish years ago), I seem to recall that the minimum size at which they became cheaper on a per-gallon basis than glass was somewhere up around 300+ gallons.
I built a lot of all-glass tanks back in the day, for myself and also while working for a local small business that made them. Back then we used much thicker glass than is typically seen today, making the tanks more costly (for that time period) than they are today and much heavier...but it also made them stronger, more resistant to damage and easier to build.
Virtually all my builds have been either 120 gallons (4 x 2 x 2 feet, made from a single 4 x 8 sheet of plywood) or 360 gallons (8 x 3 x 2 feet, made from three sheets of ply). The tanks themselves contain no 2x4's, so I'm not sure why you have any 2x4's listed at all...let alone 15 of them?
I had no idea that acrylic is now so relatively inexpensive, and I can certainly see the appeal of using it for a DIY builder, but I am curious about one issue: in what manner does an acrylic tank fail? All-glass tanks can suffer massive seam separations, dumping a huge quantity of water on the floor right now. I experienced one such incident with a commercially available tank...it's actually what led me to plywood construction...and I've helped several friend clean up the aftermath of similar catastrophes. Plywood, if it leaks at all, tends to be a slow, insidious process which is certainly not fun to witness, but it doesn't involve a huge destructive tsunami in your living room. How about acrylics? Do they typically have seams let loose, or is a failure typically a slow dribble? That's an important question to anyone who has had a, shall we say...huge dribble...
L LukeOscar , that acrylic build you have posted in another thread is awesome; it's the kind of build that makes me think I should try that technique. I'll probably never do it; I've gotten older, moved into a much smaller house, and my involvement with the hobby no longer revolves around more-more-more and bigger-bigger-bigger. If I build anymore tanks now I'm not really interested in experimenting; I'll just do what I know works for me.
You touched on one particular aspect which few seem to consider: air quality as affected by the construction materials. Most of my tanks are built standing right where they will live their lives...which now means in the basement of my home. Weight is, for me, more or less a non-issue. Large all-glass tanks are no longer on my radar screen, but I still build the odd small one for specialized purposes or for friends, and the acetic acid fumes are fairly inoffensive and easily vented. A big plywood tank can be built with the mild odour of wood glue and some sillicone; the only fumes I really worry about are from the interior sealant. Back in the day those were high-VOC coatings and precautions were strict. Today, coatings like Pond Shield and the Intraseal epoxy I have been using produce greatly reduced levels of "dangerous bad smellies"; I also recently tried my first pond-liner plywood build, using Geocel 4500 as an adhesive/sealant, and was thrilled by the lack of fumes.
What's the deal with acrylic solvents? I am sort of assuming that they are the worst of the worst when it comes to dangerous fumes; yes, no?
if you want to dive into acrylic dont think about it to much. other then the literal welding of the seams vs glueing and screwing. you work acrylic the same way you work wood. i didint have to buy any special tools to build the 320. normal wood working tools work fine. most places that sell acrylic can cut it for you perfect and every place i got quotes from had free cuts if you were buying more then 1 sheet.Yeah, when I use the epoxy it is never actually holding the tank together; I was referring to plywood tanks, glued/screwed construction, with the 2-part epoxy simply acting as the interior sealing coat. A few decades back, I used a product called Palguard, by Pratt and Lambert...I can remember this clearly, as I hunted for it relentlessly in Toronto (more or less the New York City of Canada, for all you non-Canuck members
Thanks...I think...for the info regarding acrylic solvent cements. But now I will need to find another excuse for not playing around with that construction technique; I'll probably just fall back on "I'm too old, too cheap and too lazy to start from scratch again".
The takeaway of this post was never about pushing people to use a material they don't feed comfortable using. But just an outliner for people to compare costs. As most of the build videos and threads for building large diy tanks were pre covid. I figured some people might get the wrong idea about how much cheaper a plywood tank is. Pre covid it was probably closer to half the price or less. Now it's maybe 20-25%. That alone my sway some people's decision.Yeah, when I use the epoxy it is never actually holding the tank together; I was referring to plywood tanks, glued/screwed construction, with the 2-part epoxy simply acting as the interior sealing coat. A few decades back, I used a product called Palguard, by Pratt and Lambert...I can remember this clearly, as I hunted for it relentlessly in Toronto (more or less the New York City of Canada, for all you non-Canuck members
Thanks...I think...for the info regarding acrylic solvent cements. But now I will need to find another excuse for not playing around with that construction technique; I'll probably just fall back on "I'm too old, too cheap and too lazy to start from scratch again".
