Use
Sweetwater epoxy paint; it's fish-safe and is used to make aquaculture ponds. It comes in a variety of colors, including blue and green. I would order two different colors and use one color for the base coat and another color for the top coat in order to avoid missing any spots.
Interesting idea, however I have been reading that sweetwater by itself is too thin and can be easily punctured...I want this build to be as sturdy and as long lasting as possible. Nothing says fired like building an aquarium for a university that leaks 479.74 gallons all over the lower vert classroom lab floor.
Intereting read - what do you think would work best for someone in my situation? Noob, first time builder (plywood tanks), and wanting to be as sturdy and waterproof as possible. (Keeping in mind I want a lighter color for the inside of the tank to increase visibility.)
I might also be making a styro background for this tank.
My thoughts exactly. I'm looking at making a large, 500 gallon tank but my issue is building the stand. I need to support the middle of the tank and the floor isn't level. I might have to level it myself. But I digress. Been researching this for a while if you are going large scale plywood you are gonna do one of the two fiberglass solutions as they are what have been used to best effect in all the majorly successful larger plywood tanks from 500-5,000 gallons on the internet. I myself would want to do concrete for tanks larger than 2,000 gallons.
So fiberglass and fiberglass cloth for corners and seems? Have you used this method before? What should I be looking to buy for this build if going that method? Seems like it is available at hardware stores which is convenient. Someday I will do a concrete tank - this one has to be plywood.
Most visibly appealing way to make fish visible is good light and a lighter substrate with a dark background else your fish will have a very distorted color pallet you can't really adjust by changing bulbs. If you have a blue tank it tints the whole aquarium an artificial blue, I've only ever seen one good blue backed tank and it was a dimly lit LED tank with crushed coral substrate, the way the LED adds shimmer to the tank bounced amazingly off the back of the tank adding a dancing blue to the white substrate and Texas holy rock and coral (it was an African cichlid tank).
So you want to do oddball cold water fish I imagine a number of natives will be present, Black makes your predators look way more menacing and your colorful fish like a sunfish really pop and even adds to the iridescent sheen on a black crappie. Having seen a blue backed native tank it didn't do anything for me as the blue of the background kinda drowns out any color a native might display and makes darker or predatory fish look really out of place IMHO. blue back grounds are also prone to looking horrible with any amount of algae on them. black will conceal a decent amount especially if you have more front facing lighting.
Very good points. Black, crushed coral for substrate. Easily done. Otherwise we could go with playsand, but I cant ever seem to keep my play sand clean. I stir it all up, and Ill be siphoning crap off the bottom till I run out of water. Not like theres anything wrong with that, but there is always crap still left on the sand afterwards. That is a topic for later on. First I gotta get this thing rolling.
If anyone can make me a short list of things that I will absolutely need for this build no matter what, I will go and buy those so I can get this thing started.
