Making things complicated for the sake of it (rescape and cabinet modifications!)

[Epiphyte]

Bit of background for this project. I like making things more complicated than perhaps necessary, purely for the joy of making things. I love creating and coming up with solutions to things that aren't really problems, just because it either looks good or teaches me something new. I'll start off with the rescape before describing the rest of the project on a second post.

I recently pulled this tank down because I was bored of it. Growth was explosive and I struggled to keep on top of trimming some of the faster growers meaning the hardscape was never really visible. Here's the last photo of the tank I took, probably about 6 weeks before I stripped it down.


For those of whom have seen George Farmer's video showing Tai Strietman's 1500p, they that massive piece of Java Fern in the tank now lives on in in Tai's scape, it was enormous in my 90p, but hillariously disappears in the 150cm long tank.


The carpet grew beautifully since the above photos, and I got a good 5 chunks of MC carpet this size from the tank. Not bad from 6 pots of Tropica 1-2-Grow.


I organised a trip up to Aquarium Gardens for some hardscape inspiration and a good chat with Dave, Tai and George. For someone who is a bit of an "average" scaper, it also gives me a great opportunity to use brains far more capable than mine to come up with a good layout. As always it's a good time with great people at Aquarium Gardens.


In the giant bins of wood I found possibly one of the best single bits of wood for a rescape. It wasn't cheap at £75, but in my opinion it was worth it. I have no idea what wood type it is, but it looks fantastic. I had some WIO "Jade Stone" that I used in my previous scape that I wanted to reuse, Dave kindly allowing me to bring my own supplies into the dojo. A bit of time, consultation with the aforementioned aquascaping pros, and this is the layout I finalised on. The concept was to have a main island, a sub island with a "stream" of MC wrapping around the islands. I think this layout would look better with sand, but sand is more effort when it needs syphoned out and replaced and I am lazy.


Back home, tank cleaned, with the Kings coronation in the background it was time to get started turning this blank canvas into something special. I also swapped out the WIO Bamboo lights I had on test from Tai to the WIO Slim light, just to see how it looked.


I decided to, on advice from Dave, top my old Tropica soil with some new substrate. The price difference between Tropica and ADA is minimal these days and ADA comes with root tabs. I needed some so it was a no brainer to go ADA this time around. In go the root tabs. If you can't tell I like order and uniformity


I've not used ADA Amazonia V2 before and it has a different colour from Tropica so I kept the tropica in the middle and made sure the visible soil would all be ADA. Back home of course it never goes back together as well as it does in the shop, no matter the reference photos you take, but I think I got it approximately right.


WIO Jade Stone in place, wood glued down using the substrate and superglue.


First plant in is this one. Can't remember it's name I'm afraid but Tai said it would look good so I took his word for it and bought 2 pots!


Next was a huge lump of S. Repens from my old tank, split up and planted around to bridge the MC carpet into the longer plants. This is one of about 4 bunches of this size.


Top down, you can see roughly how it's working out

Then, all of this Monte Carlo needed to work it's way in. I actually didn't get it all in, I just had too much of it.


I then forgot to take any more photos, but a mixture of stems in the back (Rotala H'ra, Myriophyllum Guyana and another Myriophyllum species that I don't know the name of, cuttings courtesy of Tai again) were planted and the tank then filled.


Overall, quite happy with the result, but naturally it looks a bit tatty on day 1. Here it is 8 days later:


11 days after flooding:


And last pic of the tank, taken today, 22 days after the rescape (today). I also added some Rotala Bonsai in the tank as it's a particular favourite of mine, though it's not particularly visible. Yes I realise a cabinet door is off in this photo, more of why that is coming up shortly...


It's certainly working it's way to needing its first trim. The H'ra has grown to the surface but I've left it a little longer than I normally would so I can make sure the roots are 100% bedded in before I disrupt the plants. I'm going to do a water change this week and give them a trim, maybe leave the MC a few more weeks before doing the same.

For the "facts" about the tank:

It's an Oase Scaperline 90, filter is the Biomaster 600 Thermo. The filter is brimmed with Seachem Matrix and a massive bag of Seachem Purigen (around 500ml). There isn't even a fraction of a tint to the water, it's gin clear, which isn't a surprise with amount of purigen. The filter has had years of running so the tank had a strong bacterial colony from day 1. I've swapped to orange sponges in the pre-filter and modified the pre-filter "tube" with about 3-4x the amount of holes it comes with as stock. The pre-filter, whilst very convenient, is the Oase's biggest downfall in my opinion, it restricts flow so badly that it doesn't take a lot to cause air issues within the filter, but that's a rant for another thread. Temperature is set to 22-23 degrees.

Stocking is light, About 15 rummynose, 15 green raspbora and a few others. I plan to add a few more as time goes on, maybe a nice nannacara pair, my fav tropical fish (as you can tell by my profile picture!)

Light is currently a WIO Slim RGB but I will probably change that soon. Not sure what to as I'm not 100% on the colour rendition on the WIO, it's a little too purple for my liking. Photo period is 8hrs at 100% and has been since day 1.

I use RO water, remineralised to a TDS value of 120. I have always used Saltyshimp, but I've just swapped out to APT Sky. I've had great success with APT products so I thought I'd give it a go.

I'm injecting CO2 but rather than the inline injection I've always used, I've decided to try a CO2 stone, my thoughts on this and why I changed my injection method can be found here. In addition I use an Intaqo CO2 controller and dosing pumps. I've been using it for about a year and love it! So nice to be able to see what the CO2 is doing in the tank rather than guessing what to do based on how a drop checker will change colour in a few hours. I do still keep a drop checker on the tank whilst I fine tune pH levels in the tank, but once I've got that set I'll move it around the back out of view.

Inlet and outlet pipes are Aquario Neo with the "bell" outlet. In addition I've also got the Oase surface skimmer in the tank, hopefully I'll get this removed now I'm no longer getting random plants floating as they've all rooted. The skimmer on the Neo pipes is more than powerful enough to keep a film free surface, I think they're a great product!

Dosing wise I actually haven't dosed this tank yet in the 3 weeks, but I'll start probably today or tomorrow as I've finalised my dosing pumps... more to come of this later. I do however use APT Zero as my ferts of choice. In my opinion lean dosing ferts is the way forward. I dose just enough (6ml per day), the plants grow beautifully, the colours are rich and since I swapped from a richer dosing regime my algae has gone from a bit of a mess to non-existent (aside of BBA, but that's CO2 related, see above).

So 3 weeks in to the new scape, plants are growing well, zero algae to be seen, BBA has all gone from the buce, I'm honestly over the moon with the tank so far.

Next post I'm going to go in to my cabinet as that's where the real fun is for me. I'll probably post it tonight or tomorrow, but hopefully it'll be interesting for you all to see, it's a little different to the norm!

 

[Epiphyte]

Part 2!

The Oase Scaperline tank is great, the glass is lovely and I love the bevelled corner joints on the glass. What impressed me too when I bought it was also the price. For a 90x45x45 tank it was only in the mid-£200 region. I see it's gone up now to the 300's but it's still a good price compared to ADA. What puts me off though is the price of the cabinet. Aquarium cabinets are basically flat pack furniture, the only "special features" they have are that they're sealed, no open ends to the panels like Ikea would have. But another 600-700 quid for a cabinet wasn't going to happen for me.

Good thing I had at the time a space to do woodwork, a track saw and a MFT table top for accurate cutting. This was back in summer 2022 when building materials went insane (I assume they still are!) but I found 18mm and 24mm pine board to be cheaper than sheets of 18mm ply. So I decided to throw together a stand for myself. BOM was around £100.

I went for a fairly standard design, two compartments with a lovely thick 24mm centre brace with vertical grain to support the centre of the tank. Everything was just biscuited, glued and clamped together. Doors were 18mm pine board hung on Blum soft close hinges which are my favourite hinges to use, they're lovely quality and so easy to adjust, worth the extra money. I also decided I wanted the doors to be flush to the base of the tank, so the front brace of the cabinet is set back about 19-20mm from the edge of the top surface of the cabinet with a bevel cut. Not my best decision as it impedes the doors opening correctly, but I'm learning how to do all of this as I go along.


Something I've also done on tanks I've made before is add a power socket outlet in the tank. I like to keep extension leads hidden away utilising smart plugs for things that need to be regularly turned on and off. However, for water changes it makes life so muche easier to plug the pump in to the cabinet rather than have to get an extension lead out or climb into the cabinet to find a spare plug. This was easy enough to do, just add a panel, put a back box in and a double socket. Job done. This is then just wired to a 3 pin plug which goes to the extension lead deep in the cabinet.


Around this time I was also checking out lots of marine cabinets, I really like their almost clinical look the really high end systems. I know I wasn't going to be able to make it look quite as sci-fi as this without a sump, pipes, valves and so on, but I thought I'd give it a go. The left side of the tank I decided to designate to the filter, the right to the other stuff. My initial plans were to have some container holding the ferts on show (and easy to access to top up) and maybe running a small tablet to adjust the lighting/systems and check out the monitoring from the Intaqo controller. With this in mind I partitioned off the right bay of the stand.


I picked up a used Amazon fire tablet from CEX for £25, hacked it to remove all the Amazon crap and added all the apps I wanted. The idea was that I'd mount it on that angled panel on the right hand side. It sort of worked, but I just ended up using my phone all the time so eventually changed tact. The panel was made removable so I could access the innards of the stand. It's not the most spacious of access, but the idea is that there is a 6 way extension lead back there with the "always on" things plugged in. I've had this set up for around a year and could count on one hand the amount of times I've gone back there for something.


The next thing I wanted to do was find a way of making the CO2 a little neater. Due to the location in my house I actually keep my CO2 bottle externally, it's out of sight but is easy to access. It also means I can get 6.35kg bottles which simply wouldn't fit in an aquarium cabinet. The only thing I don't like is hoses going everywhere, so I decided to get a Festo bulkhead fitting, mount it into an aluminium plate, router a cutout and mount it in the rear of the cabinet. This means I can run a short length of CO2 hose through the back wall of the cabinet and straight into the inline CO2 diffuser which I was using at the time.


And here's how it looks when all mounted. I know I could easily have just drilled a 6mm hole and passed the hose through the back of the cabinet, but this allows me to disconnect the CO2 hose easily if I need to move the bottle without removing the regulator, or if I need to top the bubble counter up.


In the left side of the cabinet I decided to buy some decent Blum draw sliders and make a "tray" for the filter to slide in and out on. This was definitly inspired by the original Oase stand and of all the things this is my favourite practical feature of the cabinet. Got some filter maintenance to do? No more struggling moving it out, just slide it out, do what you need to do, slide it back in. I also popped a cabinet door handle on there to make it even easier. This is 100% a must have in my opinion going forward with aquarium cabinets and large external filters.


Next job was to give it a lick of paint. I ended up using some wood dye and varnish, both made by a company called Polyvine. I wanted to see the wood grain still but not have it pine colour, I dont really like pine as a wood but I wasn't flush enough to make it out of something nice like walnut, so I decided to coat it. The varnish makes it water proof. I also painted the inside with a gloss white, again, varnished to keep the water out.


Additionally I chose some adjustable heavy duty feet. These are rated to 500kg per foot and I have 6 of them on the cabinet to spread the load, even if it's slightly overkill. Whilst they're not the nicest looking feet, they're out of sight when the stand is upright and they are adjustable despite being mounted to a flat panel of wood. No having to faff around with threaded inserts and legs. They only cost a few quid each too, would happily use them again.


So last bit of this leads me on to the left side of the left compartment of the stand, where I wanted to have my ferts bottle on show. In previous tanks I've used Voss water bottles, they're about 800ml, strong and look nice. I considered it again but got side tracked on my travels on the internet into lab glass and thought it could be a really cool idea to use some sort of test tube to store the ferts in. Like almost everything in life, a quick amazon search found me a 500ml round bottom borosilicate flask. Perfect! Not only does it look cool, they're also standard sized, so measurements are easy to come by. Mounting a round bottle like this wasn't going to be completely straight forward, but I had a few ideas.

One of the other things I've dabbled in, which is a tool that's become so useful over the years, is 3D printing. So I hopped in to Fusion 360 (a CAD program) to knock together a mount for the ferts flask. I came up with a design which supported the flask around the base, with a separate clamp for the neck to keep it in place. It's vastly over-engineered and I am considering a re-design to make it a little more slimline, but it works for now.


The great thing about 3D printing is you can come up with an idea, design it, press print and a few hours later you've got your design in your hands.


The next issue was how to both seal the flask and have a way of drawing the ferts out through the dosing pump. I did consider finding a rubber bung of some sort with a suitably sized hole in it, but that seemed boring and ugly. Once again I 3D printed out a "bung" for the flask with two o-rings to seal it. A second 1mm hole was also included to vent the flask, as the o-rings make it air tight you have to let the air in so you can pump the liquid out. Such a small hole causes no issues with ferts evaporation.


The main hole in the top was printed to the correct size to accept a 6mm PETG pipe which I cut to length so it terminates around 1mm from the base of the flask. I really wanted to bend the hard tubing as it left the top of the flask to pass it into the cabinet, but realistically that would make removing the flask stopper really difficult. I therefore decided to put another Festo 6mm to 6mm connector to go from the hard PETG tubing to soft PU tube to make the bend. Incidentally this is great tubing for CO2 runs if you don't mind the print on the side of the tube. I then made the 90 degree bend and passed the tubing through another Festo bulkhead connecter into the rear section of the cabinet. The wood in this area is 18mm thick, which is too much for the Festo bulkhead connector, so I drilled out a much larger hole and 3D printed a bulkhead passthrough.

Is this all completely pointless? Yes, absolutely, but I can't deny it looks really damn cool.

 

[Epiphyte]

Part 3!

As mentioned above, I did end up putting a cheap tablet in the cabinet to control the tanks functions, but I just never used it. Cheap tablets are slow and it was a bit of a pain to keep things up to date without Amazon realising I'd removed all their advertising and "bug fixing" their software to bring it back. I therefore decided to turn the right hand panel area into a control centre of sorts.

The only thing I currently have confirmed to go in that area are my dosing pumps. The Intaqo controller is a great bit of kit, I love to have a bit more data over how the tank is running, but the design of the product doesn't really fit with what I'm trying to do in this cabinet. I'm not saying it's an eyesore, but it's just a black box with some dosing pumps attached to the front.

I decided to remove the dosing pumps from the main unit, store the unit neatly in the cabinet and have the dosing pumps on show. Again, no reason, just looks cool.

When removing the dosing pumps I was left with two holes where the motors sat. I decided to design and print a mount that would attach the unit to the inside wall of the cabinet utilising these holes. I also designed a groove into the mount so the motor wires could exit the Intaqo unit neatly. You can also see my use of TP-Link Kasa smart plugs for my lights and surface skimmer, both controllable via my phone and my Google Home ("Hey Google, turn off the surface skimmer" is a sentance not many houses would use!)


The wires are all a bit of a mess at the moment, but a few of them are a little short. I'll go search for some longer wires then go to town with cable tie bases and cable ties to tidy it up in the future. The main thing for now is the Intaqo is back up and running and monitoring the tank.


Whilst the Intaqo was out, I made some new wires up to replace the short ones the unit that link the main board to the stepper motors. The standard wires are just cheapy 22awg ones, all in black. Fine for manufacturing but as I'm modding it I wanted some differentiation between + and - on both dosing motor 1 and 2. I had some nice quality silicone wire, red and black, and identified motor 2 with some yellow heatshrink. I find when you're changing things from stock you just open yourself up to getting things wrong, these aren't cheap units so some clarity which wire goes where is a big help.


Frustratingly I just eyeballed the new wire length and they're too short. They do reach, the pumps work fine, but they're a bit tighter than I'd have liked. Because of this I'm going to make some fresh wires up tomorrow, or whenever I remember to do so.

The dosing pumps are off the shelf units, so the dimensions were easy enough to find. Because of this I was able to design a replacement panel mount for the stepper motors. I decided I wanted the pumps on show stacked vertically, with the dosing lines going across the panel before passing through into the back of the cabinet. You can see the bottom section I've got the two holes for the dosing pumps and some hose guides for the tubing. It's not the most elegant and I intend to re-design it, but it'll do for now. You can also see the notch in the bottom right, this is to clear the cabinet door hinges.


My 3D printer has a fairly large 320x320 build plate, but even with that I had to split the design in two. That's fine, it makes no real difference and actually allows me access into the rear of the cabinet without removing the dosing pumps. It also gives me the chance to modify the top half of the panel with new items as I continue this project, rather than reprint the whole thing. Right now it's blank, but I suspect over time it'll get new additions.

To mount the panel in the cabinet I decided to use a subframe and hold the front parts on with magnets. This means everything is easily removable when I need to get into the cabinet. This sub frame is held on with a few screws and can also be replaced easily.
.

Again, stupid mistake on my part is that I ordered magnets that were a little too weak. It holds the panel on, but it's a little easy to knock off. As with all things 3D printing it's really easy for me to make another one in a few hours, so I can add more magnets to the design, or perhaps locating pins.

As you can see, the dosing pumps now sit nice and flush with the face plate. The motors pass through the back and then all I have to do is wire them up.


I also replaced the silicone hose in the dosing pump. I found that there was leakage somewhere between the different hoses on one of the barb connectors, causing there to be crusty dried ferts in the cabinet. The silicone tubing is really soft and I'm not sure it's effective if I connected it directly to the Festo connector in my previous post. What I decided to do was reduce the amount of joints to just a single one, between some stiffer hose that seals well in the Festo connector and the soft silicone in the peristaltic pump. This just reduces failure points by one, meaning there is one continuous hose from the back of the ferts flask all the way to the tank. I then threaded this hose through the face plate. A quick test proved everything was working correctly, but I've yet to prime the lines with ferts.


The other reason I intend to re-print this panel is that the 3D print infill is visible. I decided to print with 3 top layers rather than 4 or 5 as I was low on filament, but when I do it again I'll make the top layer thicker so you can't see the criss cross pattern in the print.

I've yet to decide what to do with the 2nd dosing pump, though I will add silicone hoses in there to make it look neat even if it's not used.

More to come!

 

[SirBuce]

Incredible DIY work - this is another level of fun on the hobby aha. Appreciate all the details you outlined also, amazing project so far lol.

Looking forward for more updates ha.

 

[Myrtle]

You should go into business building these setups!

 

[G H Nelson]

Hi
Love the new scape, what a great journal.

 

[hypnogogia]

Looking great, and love the detail and effort going into the diy stand. I’d like to see a full stand shot, with open and closed doors..

 

[Epiphyte]

Incredible DIY work - this is another level of fun on the hobby aha. Appreciate all the details you outlined also, amazing project so far lol.

Looking forward for more updates ha.

Thank you! Making things has always been my passion. Don't mind what it is but if I can use my hands to put something together I'm happy. I'm completely self taught and every time I make something it's an excuse to learn a new technique. There's usually a thought of "that's good but I bet I could do something better for cheaper" that gets me thinking, then I just expand from there. Reality is when you're DIYing the end product isn't usually as polished as something that you could buy in a store, but there is something nice about it being completely customised to your needs. If you were to put my stand next to the stock Oase one theirs will look far nicer, but that's not really the point.

You should go into business building these setups!

I've thought about it and have made cabinets for friends before, but financially it makes little sense to make these commercially. Materials alone for this stand were probably £100-120, hinges £30, draw slider £10, handle £5, feet £15. So that's £150-170 before I've factored in my time. Throw in 2 days of construction time, consumables, overheads and the hassle of selling, suddenly we're talking about £400-500 for a stand like this as a minimum. At this point most people would just buy the original stand.

Here are some of the stand I've made:


Small 25cm cube shrimp tank. Thought I'd be clever and feed the hoses through the top of the tank and keep the CO2 bottle set in there too. Looked fantastic, absolute nightmare to maintain. I'd broken the lilypipe in this pic, hence the stock ugly oase inlet.


60p tank. This tank/cabinet now belongs to @Courtneybst though he's done an incredible job making the cabinet a work of art with some really great paint.


45p cabinet on the right made to match the ADA 75p cabinet on the left.


Not the best picture of the stand but this was another pine cabinet I made for a 75p.

Hi
Love the new scape, what a great journal.

Thanks Hoggie, more to come!

Looking great, and love the detail and effort going into the diy stand. I’d like to see a full stand shot, with open and closed doors..

I'll certainly do those shots when it's finished. There is a way for me to go for it to be complete, but I'll document the process.

 

[Epiphyte]

Next thing I've got to do is fashion a clamp for the ferts tubes to fix onto the tanks glass. There are a bunch of commercial solutions in the marine world but they're more suited to being attached to a sump and will detract from the nice appearance of planted tank. Good thing I've got a 3D printer!

I have a glass U bend for looping CO2 hose over the top of the tank that I thought of using, but it terminates under the water line which introduces syphoning issues (unlikely with a peristaltic pump but always a possibility), but I like the look of it. With this in mind, a quick score with a triangle file and now I have two neat outlets. I'll only be actively using one of these pipes, but I have two dosing pumps so I'll design something to hold both in case I use the second pump in the future.



These will need to be held in place over the edge of the tank, so I'll 3D print a clamp to keep them in place. I am by no means an expert in CAD or product design, but years of trial and error has given me a rough idea how to come up with sensible solutions. So here's how I go about designing something for those who are interested.

Step 1: Hash out a rough 2D sketch of what you want the item to look like from one side.


Step 2: Add dimensions to create a "final" shape.


Few things to note in the design. If you rest an item like this over the edge of the tank you'll get water soaking up via capillary action, so placing a V shape to rest on the tank edge stops this. Don't ask me how I learnt about this (it involved a very wet floor). I'm also keeping a larger space at the back to affix a screw to clamp up to the tank, more on that later.

Step 3: Extrude the sketch to turn a 2D image into a 3D object. I went for an arbitrary 25mm for now, but I'll adjust this when I work out how thick it needs to be.


Step 4: Add something to hold the glass pipes in place. They're 6mm in diameter so I create two holes to hold them in place. 3D printing is really accurate dimensionally, but I find going 0.25mm wider gives a snug fit with the glass due to imperfections in both the tubes and the printing process. Once I had the holes in the right places I lined everything up and reduced the part thickness to 22mm.


Step 5, do the same for the silicone hoses to keep them in place. They're 5mm outside diameter, but the high friction of silicone means I want a little more space around the hose for them to pass through easily, so I'll make them 5.5mm diameter and make two sets of the holders for neatness.


Step 6: Find a way of attaching it securely to the tank. I'll just use an M4 bolt through a hole in the side. The great thing with 3D printing is you can print threads in place. They're not usually the smoothest of threads but it means no need to tap or insert a nut. It's a low stress thread too and in my experience will be more than adequate for this application. Just like with a proper tapped hole in metal, a chamfer on the hole makes life a lot easier.


Step 7: Obviously I don't want to have a metal bolt tight up against glass (its a great way to rapidly drain your tank), so what I've done is cut out a hole for a "pressure spreader" for use of a better term. This is just a printed plate which spreads the pressure of the end of the bolt (around 7mm^2) to a larger disc (approx 900mm^2).

To put this into maths, if the bolt is putting just 1N of force on the glass, the bolt head (assuming an M4 bolt, with an end diameter of 3mm) will put over 20PSI of pressure on the glass. Increasing this to a larger disc will put 0.16PSI on the glass. I have no idea how much force a bolt would apply, but even a tiny 1N produces massive numbers.



I put a locating recess in the rear with a chamfer for finding the hole easier (life problems!)


Here's a better view how it goes together


Step 8: Chamfer all of the holes to make it easier to pass hoses through. 1mm is more than enough.


Step 9: Add some curves


Step 10: Add a 0.5mm chamfer around the whole object. This isn't strictly necessary but it stops any "elephant foot" in the 3D print ruining external dimensions. Elephants foot is a thing in 3D printing where the bottom few layers get squished down and it throws the dimensions out fractionally out as can be seen here:


My 3D printer is pretty well calibrated, but it causes no harm to add it. Also I think it gives the finished object a bit of a better appearance.


Step 11: Import the 3D model into your slicing software of choice. A slicer is the program that takes a CAD model and slices it up into thin layers to print. Most 3D prints use layer heights of 0.2mm. Meaning this model at 22mm thick will have 110 layers to it. You can adjust this, often I'll use layer heights of 0.28mm if I'm printing something large, but for smaller models 0.2 is fine. I use Ultimaker Cura 5.3 at the moment and find it both easy to use and reliable. Import both parts of the model to Cura, orient them to the direction you want to print them then "slice" the model.

3D printers can print overhangs of about 60 degrees, so technically the curved parts wont be the worlds best print but I'm not too worried. I could use supports but they're a pain to remove on small models.


As you can see the software thinks it'll use 5.62m of filament, or 17g in total and should print in 41 minutes, though I suspect this to be closer to 50min.

For the 3D printing nerds out there like me, my setup is a BLV MGN Cube printer using an E3D Hemera direct drive hot end. For this part I'm printing with 4 top/bottom surfaces, 4 walls with alternating extra wall. Infill is standard grid infill at 25%. Print temps are 255C hot end, 70C bed temp. Print speeds are 135mm/s. I'm using eSun PETG 1.75mm filament.

Step 12: Heat up printer in prep for the print and upload the files. When it's hot, press print. Here's the UI of my 3D printer using Duet Web Control


Step 13: Watch the first layer go down, it's the most important one of the print!


Step 14: go make myself a cup of coffee because its 13:20 and I've not had one in a few hours and I've got nothing to do until this print finishes.

 

[G H Nelson]

First plant in is this one. Can't remember it's name I'm afraid but Tai said it would look good so I took his word for it and bought 2 pots!

Hygrophila sp. 'Bold'

Hygrophila sp. ‘Bold’ is a strikingly coloured Hygrophila species that appeared in aquaristics in the USA in 2006 for the first time. As it seems, this plant is not yet in cultivation in Europe.It is not clear at the moment which species it...

www.flowgrow.de

 

[Epiphyte]

For those interested, this is how things are printed. I've converted it to a GIF but this is real time speed. As mentioned this is a fairly well tuned 3D printer that prints quite fast (135mm/s versus the normal 50-60mm/s of hobby grade printers), it draws the edges, the infill, then does a slow pass for a neater outside wall. It then drops the print bed 0.2mm and does it all over again 109 more times until you have the finished part.


Print comes off the bed like this. After what I said above there is a small amount of elephant foot, but easy to fix. Thankfully the glass pipes fit great



Find a suitably sized M4 bolt and attach it to the glass. At this point I realised I made a bit of a mistake with the design and there was no need to have inset the pressure pad plate thing. That's fine, for mk2 I'll change that. The joy of 3D printing is you can rapid prototype really quickly, taking less than an hour to make the part.


In the mean time I decided to print a thicker circular disk to circumvent the problem. As I said above:

I am by no means an expert in CAD or product design, but years of trial and error has given me a rough idea how to come up with sensible solutions.

Sometimes it takes a few times to get to those solutions! Good thing it only took 10 mins to print the new part.


You can see my design tilted the dosing tubes 10 degrees down. This just means the ferts will drip towards the end of the tube, reducing risk of ferts running down the glass tube and caking up around the printed part. I don't know if this will work but time will tell.

Replacement clamping plate thing printed and now it fits perfectly on the tank.


I may refine this design over time, but now I can start to dose the tank daily.

 

[Epiphyte]

One last entry for todays work.

I hate spade connectors. I'm sure if I invested in some good crimping tools it would be fine but I haven't so I despise using them. The first wiring harness was a little short so immediately the wires got pulled out of the crimps. On the second, much longer, wiring loom, I decided to crack out some trusty leaded solder and drop a blob into the connector. I now have the convenience of a removable spade connector, but the security and electrical integrity of a soldered joint.


I also hate the terrible plastic/rubber insulation you get with spade connectors, so I replaced those with heatshrink.


As you can see, it looks far neater too. I'm sure once this is sealed in the Intaqo enclosure, behind a panel in the cabinet which is also behind a closed door I will really appreciate the neatness.


Panel on


And for the first time, ferts line primed and daily dosing has started. As I had hoped, no drips stayed on the tube once the dosing had stopped. In the wise words of Borat, great success!


On my to do list:
*Lighting on both sides. I'd like LED's to come on automatically when the doors open.
*Improve the CO2 line routing through the cabinet, especially now I've finalised where the CO2 diffuser will live.
*Re-design and print the front panel for the ferts to make it look a little neater with better opacity of the print.
*Integrate some cool, yet unknown, functionality into the top half of the control panel. I'm considering some control for the lights or perhaps something CO2 related.

 

[Epiphyte]

First plant in is this one. Can't remember it's name I'm afraid but Tai said it would look good so I took his word for it and bought 2 pots!
View attachment 206103

Hygrophila sp. 'Bold'

Hygrophila sp. ‘Bold’ is a strikingly coloured Hygrophila species that appeared in aquaristics in the USA in 2006 for the first time. As it seems, this plant is not yet in cultivation in Europe.It is not clear at the moment which species it...

www.flowgrow.de

I've just heard that it was Hygrophila Araguaia, not sure if this is the tropica branding for sp. Bold, but it looks very similar.

 

[SirBuce]

Thank you! Making things has always been my passion. Don't mind what it is but if I can use my hands to put something together I'm happy. I'm completely self taught and every time I make something it's an excuse to learn a new technique. There's usually a thought of "that's good but I bet I could do something better for cheaper" that gets me thinking, then I just expand from there. Reality is when you're DIYing the end product isn't usually as polished as something that you could buy in a store, but there is something nice about it being completely customised to your needs. If you were to put my stand next to the stock Oase one theirs will look far nicer, but that's not really the point.

I've thought about it and have made cabinets for friends before, but financially it makes little sense to make these commercially. Materials alone for this stand were probably £100-120, hinges £30, draw slider £10, handle £5, feet £15. So that's £150-170 before I've factored in my time. Throw in 2 days of construction time, consumables, overheads and the hassle of selling, suddenly we're talking about £400-500 for a stand like this as a minimum. At this point most people would just buy the original stand.

I thought for a second you made the U tube there aha (did you lol).

Well done really! Definitely a unique feeling when you are using something that you DIY'ed vs paying for a mass produced product. I mean since you have invested on the tools already (I thought that you are an engineer or tradesperson? aha), you are basically into the DIY hobby so why not have more fun altogether ahaha. And yes, practically, the time/effort/expertise you spent on DIY will more or less equal to the commercial pricing (with less polished look, as you mentioned), so the commercial pricing is not too bad especially if you could get a fair or discounted price. That said, I would LOVE to be able to create some cabinets like you did, the skill/experience from the work is so valuable and handy nowadays - I mean like it would be so much easier for you to modify any commercial product to your liking if needed (like I can't confidently make a hole between the 2 compartments of my cabinet lol).

For aquascaping, I thought about the most 'effective' way to get into the hobby, like I could ask some local expert to do it for me and be done with it - but what's the fun in that? The learnings and do it yourself parts are the most exciting bit of the (any) hobby ha.

 

[Kaliilo]

Wow, the original tank was gorgeous but this looks lovely. The cabinets looks perfect, shame you dont sell them haha. Impressed with the level of DIY skill you and others here have, will watch this with interest