Its been a while

Wow its been a while, School and life took me on a weird journey of design competitions, building a 3D printer and now getting back into a hobby which i left roughly 4 years ago and that is breeding and selective breeding of crystal red shrimps.

At this moment I'm thinking how i should go regarding this blog, I would hate to start new blogs constantly for new topics... so I was thinking to throw all my blog posts into one location. That might end up making this blog a little random, but lets see how that goes. If it ends up being too chaotic, I'll look for other methods but meanwhile you might find 3-5 different topics flowing within this blog post on a constant basis.

Start of a new personal tank

Hi guys,

I thought id hear one of my biggest passions with everyone that views the blog, I am and have been a big reef keeper. For the last 5 years I've kept picos and nanos. My biggest being the current system which i set up just a few days ago.

The new system specs:

tank: 36" x 13.25" x 13" (1/4" thickness)

sump: 24" x 11" x 14"

lighting: 5x PAR38 (9x3W Cree XP-E)

skimmer: SWC 160 cone

pumps: 2x Vortech MP40 WES

Suppliment: 2x dosing pumps (1.1ml/min)

All the corals in the system are from my old tank some are of decent size while others are frags. For now I'll leave it at that. You can find my threads on both reef central and nano reef.

heres some progress shots for everyone viewing.

SWC 160 cone skimmer

SWC is a company thats good at pushing out quality skimmers with a reasonable cost. The SWC 160 cone which has been reviewed quite a bit is no exception. The skimmeris a nice piece of hardware thats easy to install for the everyday reefer. The best part about this skimmer for me is the aesthetics, the white acrylic it uses makes this skimmer look to be a high end skimmer. Now im not saying this skimmer is bad, its far from it but like everything we buy, the looks matter quite a bit as the aquarium industry/hobby is based quite heavily on visual representations.

The packaging on the skimmer is in my opinion as good as it gets for a pre-fabricated unit, the foam used in the packing is 1"thick on all sides and when I got the box it felt rigid. The skimmer came with everything, and a piece of paper for the manual which i find to be quite useless since the skimmer was so easy to use.

Features:

-Cone Body

-Large Collection Cup

-Gate Valve Wedge Pipe for ease of tunning

-Silencer

-650 litres/hour air draw

-Small Footprint of 9" x 7" x 20.58"

-Fully dis-assemble for cleaning

The skimmer itself has pretty good craftsmanship, a decent thickness on the acrylic was used and the seams seem well put together. The collection cup snaps in via a compression of o-ring like you would see on a BK or vertex cone skimmer and requires only 1/2" clearance to get the cup out. The venturi is pretty nice as well , it snaps in just like the collection cup so cleaning should be pretty easy. There you have it a skimmer thats built with the reef keepers in mind one that will work efficiently without breaking the banks.

Final: Mame update

having tested the overflow in a spare tank with freshwater i found the venturi tubes inner diameter to be too small. Though the system did work during the priming stages the water in the tank would get close to the rim and i didnt want to take the chance of it flooding. So in an attempt to bore out the venturi the bit caught the acrylic and cracked both venturis down the middle of the pipe. For those that are planning on building a replica down the line i would recommend buying 1/4" thin walled tubing for the venturi. Overall though the project has been fairly easy to do and the cost was only $25 for all the material cost that is buying the tubing at full length as well (6ft). For the time being I'll be going a different route with my personal reef tank and hope you guys enjoyed the build.

Final: Mame Overflow

after 3 days of work the construction of the mame overflow DIY edition has come to an end. It was a pretty interesting experience. I would estimate the total amount of time invested in creating this overflow took less then 8 hours total. I have ordered a pump able to push 300GPH at 4ft so i'll be testing it out once i recieve the pump and will post a video of it.

Continuation: Acrylic Mame Overflow construction

did a bit more work on the overflow and so far its coming along great. I forgot to mention that i decided to use 7/8" OD tubing for the drain and 5/8" OD tubing with thin wall for the return which isnt part of the assembily yet. The overflow is broken down into 3 parts just like the origional mame version for ease of cleaning and connected together via 3/4" ID (lack of 7/8" tubing from local stores) vinyl tubing and 5/8" ID tubing Im looking forward to seeing this thing come together and working.

I'll let the pictures do the talking from here on.

The Beginning

As stated in the last post I've started the building of a Mame Overflow via the use of acrylic. The first step, bending acrylic tubes. There are of course multiple ways of doing this but the way i chose to do it is without fillers or using a spring, I always find this way produced the best result with the least amount of kinks.

The key to this type of bending is the sum of the bends equals the total arc you want to achieve.