60 cube build

Well, this is going to be the start of a very long, slow tank build.   I'm piecing the build together slowly, and hoping it will be full of top notch equipment (which makes it go even slower!).   Anyway, the tank is a 24" cube, 60 gallon rimless tank.   I've never done a rimless tank, so I'm pretty excited to see how it turns out.   It will have a basement sump, and be lit by AI's Hydra.    That's about all I know so far.    I've had the tank about a month now, and my wife got me a stand for christmas, so I'm slowly chipping away at the things I need.   Part of the tank build required me to move and upgrade my dart frog vivarium, so I will include a couple of those pics as well.    

I live in an old victorian house in a part of Ogden that is getting a bit of a rehab lately, so sometimes this entails having a lot of people touring through my house (city people, or people looking to do something similar, or people that appreciate old architecture), so the goal for all my tropical animals was to make them fit in with the aesthetic of the house without being a distraction. Luckily for me, people in the victorian era had an affinity for keeping exotic pets, so its been a great way to learn some history as I explored how I wanted things to look.    

Initially this was easier with the frogs, because I found an old looking greenhouse thing (I don't even know how to describe it, although historically they were called wardian cases).   It was a perfect find, it just required me to build a sealed glass cage inside of it, which I finally accomplished this past week.   It will house three thumbnail dart frogs and a range of tropical plants.   





A couple pics of the future inhabitants:




The fish tank has been a little harder to decide how my wife and I want it to look.   In one of our front rooms, we created some industrial shelves, imitating a little of the steampunk victorian look (there is some cool stuff being built out there, google image search steampunk and you will see all sorts of history, and industrial stuff combined together), and decided it would be fun to make the tank a little industrial as well.   Here are the shelves we were basing some of our ideas on:




Those shelves led me to think about hanging my light from something like this:




I found a perfect cabinet for a tank stand out in Smith and Edward's army surplus lot, and my wife surprised me with it for christmas.   
So after a long detour to how I got here, here is where the tank stands for now:





I plan on making a distressed wood drawer for the open slot, and some sort of shelf around the tank to hide the foam it needs to sit on.   It still needs some work and needs to be leveled out, but I'm pretty excited it is sitting where it will stay! I'll try and keep pictures fresh as things move along, but it will be slow!

Cheers,
PJ

Oh man, I am excited for this build too and the Wardian Case is gorgeous! 

Edited by Mike Savage - December 26 2013 at 7:55pm

Thanks for the support! Hope I can meet the expectations.   

Wow that the tank fits better than expected on that stand.

I always love to see what you do next:) I bet it will look awesome when you are done!

Looking good!

^^ Thanks.   Dart frogs are awesome. It provides me a diversion if my reef isn't going well, and sometimes it's nice to add really nice things to a tank that don't cost a fortune! Utah has some great resources for dart frogs, probably some on this board.   

I will be going through the wall. I worked way to hard on my floors! The wall is about a foot thick because it used to house a pocket door. The wall has a couple access holes already in it from an old entertainment system from a previous owner. I have a an angle attachment for my drill that I will use to make sure it goes in the right location. I'll make sure to get some pics of the process

Did a little led retrofit on the frog tank for those that are interested (I promise this will become a reef tank build at some point, hopefully soon, I'm getting a fair amount of equipment built up sitting at Aquatic Dreams). They are called Hit lights. They have a waterproof strip light 6000k I think they would make great 'fuge lights. Relatively cheap. I bought 16 feet of leds (4 watts, 260 lumens a foot) and a power supply for 55 bucks on amazon.   

The date for the cube build has been set. I took the week of spring break off to do some major work on the build and hopefully it will be up and cycling by the end of that week.    Starting to rething the lighting.   Now, I'm considering either the sol or going with the ecotech radians (maybe even the gen3). Anyone have any input?
Anyway, I'm pretty excited to get started.   Also, finally finished up the frog tank. Frogs will move into their new home later this week.   
The next post will have fish stuff, I promise!