Picture dump but I wanted to wait to post the stand once I got it skinned to POSSIBLY squash any eye rolling as I completely understand the skepticism of completing a project like this without it looking cheesy. Hope that’s what I accomplished. Here we go....!
Gluing on the half rounds
2 or 3 layers of metallic copper followed by 2 layers of clear coat
Vinyl panels on the end piece
Left side looking pretty flush. On to the next...
Most of the stand trim in place. I did all of this with a finish nailer. My recommendation is to make absolute certain that your settings are correct on scrap wood before firing nails into the project
Guess I can’t ALWAYS be perfect
So the deal I had originally made with myself was that I would not open this tablesaw until I got the garage cleaned out but it turns out babies don’t wait for you to complete projects so I had to break my rule. Shucks!
My very first table saw accomplishment. Kerfing the entire 28”x36” surface
Protein skimmer arrived! Bubble Magus Curve Elite 5
I built a base that sits directly on the black trim of the tank and then framed everything around that
Above are the brackets, nuts, and machine screws that I decided to go with. Down below you will see that I had to cut the brackets to accommodate for the wire that sticks out just below the screw hole in my AI prime 16 HD light
I painted the brackets to match the light fixtures and then applied two layers of clearcoat. Right behind it you can see the aluminum 3 foot angle segment that I used to create the mounting bracket in the canopy. I drilled 5/16” holes only because that was the only metal drill bit that I actually own and the listed hardware above fit perfectly
Here is the mock up of how the lights will hang
OK this part was an absolute disaster. The plan was to glue this thin piece of wood to the underside of the canopy to provide rigidity to the lid that would eventually be on hinges. It’s a little difficult to explain until you get to the bottom and see how I cut out the opening on the canopy. Basically what happened is this giant wood piece just snapped right in half as my father-in-law and I were trying to curve it. Some quick thinking and two sets of hands were able to make a speedy recovery
Here is the underside of the canopy nailed together. As you can see all of the wood glue is now exposed unfortunately making it a little less pretty
The finish nailer was the king of the day
Test fitment was absolutely perfect with probably 1/16 of an inch to spare
This was the next disaster of the project! So the thought was again because I made so many cuts when I was Kerfing the top canopy piece, the edges of the cuts were not touching once it was curved around the half circle pieces. This made me think that when I cut out my canopy latch, that the whole piece would just straighten out instead of keeping its curved form. I mixed up this Bondo brand adhesive/filler and it was just very difficult to get it to go into the cracks therefore I probably ended up using twice the amount of product that I needed to and it still didn’t completely cover the interior of the canopy. The problem with this product is that it sets in 3-5 minutes so I want you to picture of me sitting on a bucket with a paper plate in my lap mixing this stuff up and trying to cram it into all of those grooves in less than three minutes... not fun!
I was really concerned about whether this vinyl would stay curved because the adhesive had already proved to be absolutely useless on a vertical surface. Luckily those finish nails were barely visible and I just went to town on them
I sent this picture to my best friend and he was quick to point out that the flowers in the background made this look like a casket!
When you don’t have a 36 inch clamp you get creative. Let’s just say when I tried to do this without my wife’s help, one of the clamps jumped off of the tank, swung down, and conveniently found my kneecap. I felt that for a solid 24 hours
I didn’t realize until I got to this picture during this post that I hadn’t mentioned the goal was to make this project look like a treasure chest so hopefully this is the first picture which is somewhat indicative of those intentions
This was the beginning of a very fruitless night working on the canopy. All I had to do was nail the last two pieces of trim in place and I put the left side on backwards. At first I thought no big deal I will just pop off the half rounds and move them to the appropriate spot. Turns out what they say about what glue is correct because the bond that the half round had on the wood trim or stronger than the wood trim itself
I felt like I was so close to being done and this was quite a setback but really when I look back on it, it didn’t take that long to fix the mistake. I was able to make all of the kerfing cuts on a new piece of trim, glue on the half rounds, spray paint and clearcoat all in that evening and attached it all in the morning
Spray painted some handles that we found at hobby lobby and got them mounted to each side. Unfortunately because of the lighting in the room, even though they are perfectly centered, they don’t quite appear that way
You can see a few different things in this picture. One of the two lights is now mounted to the top bracket. Unfortunately after priming, painting and clear coating the interior of the canopy, The perfect 1/16 inch gap for the canopy fitting on top of the aquarium had disappeared and it was quite difficult to get the canopy back on. I mention this because mounting the lights was very difficult with the canopy already in place and I just didn’t want to take the canopy off to do it. Either way it ended up getting done. The other thing that you can see is how much of that Bondo product did not fit into the grooves. At this point I didn’t see the benefit in sanding it all smooth since it was just the inside of the canopy.
Here is a picture of everything in place with the three different compartments open. I will place a picture of the final product in my next post!
