UrbanDryad
Member
I get my tanks second-hand. They often need cleaning, and sometimes repairs. I'd like some opinions about what I can do with the following bits and pieces.
1) Superfish Scaper 45. It had a few chips on the corners when I got it, but after cleaning it, I noticed this crack in the glass. It might have been my fault, I'm not sure whether it was there before. I'm doing a water test now, but I'm not optimistic. When I press on the smaller bit of glass from the inside, I can hear noises, so it's clearly not going to withstand the pressure of 45 litres of water. So... silicone it back together and hope, patch it with a small piece of glass on the exterior, or deconstruct it and replace the entire pane and then put it back together? Or would it be possible to just fill that corner of the aquarium with expanding foam / silicone and keep it away from the water pressure entirely? I really wanted to get this up and running so I'm quite frustrated at the idea that I might need to find an entire replacement pane before I can start planting it up...
2) Clearseal 16L. It's got a bunch of chips around the bottom edges. Are these likely to be a problem for the structural integrity? I was planning to silicone it to a thick foam underlay and add trim around the bottom edges, so they'd be packed in quite firmly by other design elements.
3) Juwel Primo 54L. The silicone connecting two panes of glass has some damage to the external part of the bead. It's held up to one overnight water test, but is this doomed in the long-term? In most advice about resealing aquariums, they differentiate between the bead of silicone used to attach the panes together, and the bead used to ensure the inside is watertight. They say that when resealing, you can remove the internal silicone without deconstructing the whole tank, so long as you leave the attaching bead in place. However, in this case, there's just the one attaching bead (see first picture below). So if I wanted to reseal it, would I cut off the internal parts of the attaching bead in order to add a new sealing bead? Or should I just take the entire thing apart and reattach everything with new silicone?
4) Unknown 40L. This has the same bead structure as the above Juwel one, but it looks like the outer part of the bead has been sliced off, so I'm sharing this partly as an illustration of a counterpoint - if this tank works as-is, maybe the missing segment of external bead on the Juwel is no big deal? I also have a potential issue with it, though - see second and third picture below. One of the panes looks weirdly offset - kind of an unexpected gap between the two panes of glass, filled only by the silicone. I'm wondering if this will be a long-term structural problem?
Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any advice. Also, if you've got recommendations for forums / online spaces where there's a culture of regularly reconstructing / resealing tanks, I'd be grateful for that too! There seem to be a lot of places where the advice is just "don't do it, buy a new one" even though it's definitely possible. (I'm a fan of Serpa Design, I've seen him rebuild / reseal a whole lot of old glass tanks!)
1) Superfish Scaper 45. It had a few chips on the corners when I got it, but after cleaning it, I noticed this crack in the glass. It might have been my fault, I'm not sure whether it was there before. I'm doing a water test now, but I'm not optimistic. When I press on the smaller bit of glass from the inside, I can hear noises, so it's clearly not going to withstand the pressure of 45 litres of water. So... silicone it back together and hope, patch it with a small piece of glass on the exterior, or deconstruct it and replace the entire pane and then put it back together? Or would it be possible to just fill that corner of the aquarium with expanding foam / silicone and keep it away from the water pressure entirely? I really wanted to get this up and running so I'm quite frustrated at the idea that I might need to find an entire replacement pane before I can start planting it up...
2) Clearseal 16L. It's got a bunch of chips around the bottom edges. Are these likely to be a problem for the structural integrity? I was planning to silicone it to a thick foam underlay and add trim around the bottom edges, so they'd be packed in quite firmly by other design elements.
3) Juwel Primo 54L. The silicone connecting two panes of glass has some damage to the external part of the bead. It's held up to one overnight water test, but is this doomed in the long-term? In most advice about resealing aquariums, they differentiate between the bead of silicone used to attach the panes together, and the bead used to ensure the inside is watertight. They say that when resealing, you can remove the internal silicone without deconstructing the whole tank, so long as you leave the attaching bead in place. However, in this case, there's just the one attaching bead (see first picture below). So if I wanted to reseal it, would I cut off the internal parts of the attaching bead in order to add a new sealing bead? Or should I just take the entire thing apart and reattach everything with new silicone?
4) Unknown 40L. This has the same bead structure as the above Juwel one, but it looks like the outer part of the bead has been sliced off, so I'm sharing this partly as an illustration of a counterpoint - if this tank works as-is, maybe the missing segment of external bead on the Juwel is no big deal? I also have a potential issue with it, though - see second and third picture below. One of the panes looks weirdly offset - kind of an unexpected gap between the two panes of glass, filled only by the silicone. I'm wondering if this will be a long-term structural problem?
Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any advice. Also, if you've got recommendations for forums / online spaces where there's a culture of regularly reconstructing / resealing tanks, I'd be grateful for that too! There seem to be a lot of places where the advice is just "don't do it, buy a new one" even though it's definitely possible. (I'm a fan of Serpa Design, I've seen him rebuild / reseal a whole lot of old glass tanks!)