The "schrinking-effect" is well known *lol*.
Hardscape goes in; size halves - plants go in; size halves again..........
One optical trick, though, is to keep "stuff" not too close to front glass. This gives better impression of depth and perspective. Another trick is to move one or two taller plant forwards, to avoid a "hedge-effect" in background. This is purely for perspective.
- it'll be a beautifull tank anyway - don't worry !!
lol I'll have a pico at this rate
Once I've emptied the tank I can have another play. The closest piece to the glass currently is 7", which is to the left hand side just in front of the weir. There's not much I can really do about that as I can't go any further back without losing a load of planting space, which I need to hide the weir. That's also part of the biggest piece I have, the one which sticks out of the water the most. I can't really move that without messing everything up and starting again. Not happening
I want to try and curve the wood round more, or at least use the rocks to create more of a semi circle from each front corner half way up the side, if you know what I mean? It's hard to get across in my terrible pictures how much depth there actually is. Although it is basically a straight line of wood, I've made loads of planting spaces between the front, middle and back pieces. I'm hoping once it's planted up you'll be able to see the perspective. I want to bank the sub up pretty steep as well, which should also help.
Don't worry, there'll be no hedges here
Beautiful ?!?! Pressures on then
This is crackin'
Really like the fact that you've put the glass together yourself. Test fill must have been a bit hairy. Have you done this before? Envious of anybody who can apply silicon neatly
The lighting and the bracket/rig are very stylish and modern, lovely.
The layout and shape of the wood is really striking.
If it is not to late, please can I request a few pics of the stages when you lay out the substrate?
How is the weir? I've read somewhere that the comb possibly makes it a little less efficient and noisier, is that right? Do you intend to hide the whole weir somehow?
Watching
Cheers mate, filling it up wasn't a problem. I was 100% fully confident it wouldn't leak or collapse through the floorboards
Yeah it's the first time I've built a tank and was absolutely bricking it lol I had some help with the silicone work from screwfix. I paid about £12 I think it was, for what is basically a piece of plastic which you run round the silicone to give it a nice finish. I was annoyed at the price when I got it home, but well worth the money in hindsight, I couldn't have done it without it. All the joints should be 90 degrees/flat, but I over did it a bit and went for a 6mm chamfer just to be sure, first time and that.
Sure, I'll add some pics when I finally add the sub. I'm changing my mind all the time though, it will be cactus compost and either akadama or cat litter. I really don't like the colour of either though so I will probably change my mind again. It's only for behind the wood though so colour won't matter anyway will it?! Whatever I go for I'll be mixing it probably 70/30 ish then capping with just akadama/cat litter. I'm using a light coloured sand for the front.
I'm running a twin standpipe setup so the overflow should be as near to silent as I'm going to get. You can get gurgling and splashing when using a single pipe, and depending on how low your pipes are in the weir, you could get some noise from water dropping over the comb. I can't see a problem with the way I'm going to do things but I'll get some pics up and let you know how it goes.
As for hiding the weir, that's another thing I keep changing my mind over. I've always gone for black backgrounds on my tanks which would mean simply covering it with black perspex. I want to keep it more towards the natural side, but then I see these high tech scapes with white/grey backgrounds and I think they look stunning. My current idea which I think I'm sticking with, or at least trying, is using a medium window tint as the background with an led striplight mounted on the back of the tank. Without the light on it should look black, but with the light on, it will hopefully give me a nice sort of gradient from light down to dark. I'll obviously try it out before I fill the tank back up but fingers crossed should look ok. The only problem with this idea is that I'll have to re mount the light further back so you don't see the upright and so I have space for the light, and that the weir will still be visible. It would have to come down to the plants to actually hide it. I'm planning on going around 8" with the sub anyway so shouldn't be a problem I don't think.
Edit: Scrap that, they're just too small, it's always going to look like the fish have had the builders in. I have some gritstone which I wasn't going to use, but I'm going to give this a quick clean up and see how I go with it.
). They would be perfect for this sort of scape.