The Stand - The Fish Tank

Here's the storyline for how the fish tank came to be in its current state. A friend of mine was getting rid of a 90 gal. corner aquarium and offered to give it to me....for free. Of course I said yes! There were a couple of caveats though: 1) it was originally set up as a saltwater aquarium but I had no intention of going back to saltwater and 2) the stand needed to be replaced. I had my friend bring the tank and the old stand over to my house. I didn't document things that well at the time. I only have a couple of pictures of the original stand and they are only for capturing some of the specifics.

Figure 1 - Top of original tank stand with a piece of wood clamped so that I could draw the curve. I handed this off to my dad, along with the dimensions, and he cut the top and bottom boards for the new stand. He used this arc drawing to know what the curve should look like.

Figure 2 - Original tank stand laying on its side. Looking through the hole for the sump plumbing. I put the 2x4 there to give me an idea of width.

It turns out the original tank stand was made of particle board, as they often are, and several places on the stand had come into contact with water. This meant that those areas had swelled considerably and were no longer suitable for supporting the weight of the tank. I was determined to build a new tank based on the design of the old one. So that's what I did. Using spare pieces of wood I pieced together a new stand that is likely considerably stronger and importantly, not made of particle board. The downside is that this stand weighs quite a bit. Why? I put 2x6", 2x4", and 2x2" boards in there along with three 3/4" 5-ply plywood sheets for the bottom and top decks.

Figure 3 - Basic design of the tank stand. The bow front pieces were designed to mimic the originals on the particle board stand but more heavily reinforced. There are 2x6" pieces in the back of the new stand in this image but these were later replaced with 2x4" pieces and plywood. The 90 gal tank can be seen in the background along with the 10 gal sump tank.

Figure 4 - The two front pieces of the tank stand. If you look closely in the upper left of the left stand, you can see the two 2x6" pieces at a 90 degree angle to each other. These were glued and screwed together along with a reinforcing block of wood in the corner.

Is this rebuild overkill? Perhaps, but my dad taught me to overbuild. And since this is going to hold a lot of water inside my house, I definitely don't want it to break. The final structure of the stand can be seen below.

Final structure of the stand before painting and sealing. Sheets of 3/4" plywood have been added to the back corner and reinforced with 2x4" boards. The bottom sheet is two 3/4" plywood sheets glued together while the top sheet is a single 3/4" sheet. The old stand is the black structure on the right hand side (laying on its side). The empty 90 gal tank can barely be seen toward the top left while the 10 gal sump tank on the red and white blanket in the left side of the image. You can also see an original Craftsman power drill resting on top!

Why the side piece design? The two side pieces are designed to be covered by two pieces of preformed black plastic. I was able to save these from the old stand and made the new stand so that it would be able to use these pieces and hide the underneath portion of the stand. You can see one of the pieces still on the old stand in the image above. The center portion of the original stand had a curved glass door with a dark tint to it. I was able to reuse this as well and put a new hinge and magnet clasp on the new stand. Final assembly of the stand used woodglue and screws. I then painted it black and covered it with several coats of polycrylic to provide protection from water intrusion and to make it look nice. The final product can be seen below.

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