Building a Tank stand for 65g

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shinypenny

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MFK Member
May 30, 2007
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Well I was looking to buy a stand when I picked up my new tank, but I started looking around at the ones available in the stores. Most of them are rediculous amounts of money for something that looked like it was assembled by a 5 year old. In a moment of shear stupidity I mentioned to my girlfriend that "I could do better than that" and before you know it I'm up to my arpits in wood and Home Depot receipts.

I figured that If i was going to build the stand I might as well go the whole way. I didn't want to just buy a metal stand and make a shell, this thing had to be the real deal, something I could be proud of, and hopefully something that would refrain from emptying about 65 gallons of water onto the floor of my appartment. This is especially important because I live on the third floor, so the two people downstairs would not be best pleased.

The tank the stand is planned for is a 65gallons. Not too big right, how hard could it be? Well the first issue is that it's a 24" tall, 18" wide tank, so it's quite top heavy. With this depth the weight per sq inch is the same as in a 180gal, so care is needed.

I initialy browsed online, but some of the deseigns were so aweful I decided to take a few things from them but basically go my own way and se how it went.

I figured i would post this thread as my attempt to get others to try this for themselves. I have never done anything like this before. In fact I had to buy my first saw to get started (amongst other things). If I can do it I'm pretty sure that anyone can. So here goes nothing....

And it was a first attempt so I would change a few things, or do a few things differently next time. Feel free to chime in with your own ideas. The more input the less chance of these mistakes being repeated by MFKers all over the country :)

So a few pictures of the startup, what do we need....

Wood for base, 1/2" plywood, I think it's 2'x4'


Wood for the legs, side and doors, 4"x2" for corner legs, 3"x2" for center legs and top and bottom rail (you'll see later) and 3"x1" for outer casing. I prefer to do it with planks because I don't like the look of a big piece of plywood on the outside. all the wood came in 8' lengths I think...



Wood screws to hold it all together.



And plans to stear me in the right direction. Not too neat, but good enough to allow me to work out how much wood I need.

 
So all the materials are in, now is about time to start on the stand. After some deliberations I decided to keep the tank about 22" off the ground. It's a very nice hight if you've got a low couch from which to watch it. So with the height decided the first step was to cut out all of the legs, the top, and the side supports. This way I could at least be consistent, I didn't want to do half, then come back tomorrow and cut the other half a little differently. So basically I just cut all of the wood for the frame.

Here is the cut wood in front of the tank (which is sitting on a new IKEA coffee table, much to the displeasure of my girlfriend :nilly: )



This will be where the tank finally lives. The window is North facing and it will be lit sparcely, so there shouldn't be too many problems with algae.

Anyway, next day I figured I better start putting something together. At this point I affixed the legs to the top, and ended up with something that looked rather like a wonky coffee table. First lesson, one screw does not fix things very solidly, it still gives it the opportunity to pivot, so when in doubt use 2.



You can see from the picture that the legs in the corners are thicker than the legs in the middle, that's just for my piece of mind, no real reason for it. I guess there's so little difference in the cost of wood, why not just use a thicker piece when you have the room.

Anyhow, slightly concerned about how wobbly it was, I forged ahead trying to sure things up a bit. Next I added a few braces to the underside of the top. This was mainly for two reasons, one was to try and spread the weight as much as possible to the legs, and off the top. The other was to hold the legs parallel. The last thing i needed was the legs splaying under all that weight and just letting 550 lb of water crash to the ground. Oh yeah and by this time I worked ou that the tank contains about 550lb of water, that didn't exactly calm my nerves.

This pic gives a good idea of how the center braces would look, I couldn't get a good one once they were in place.

 
So now to wrap around the top and bottom to give the whole stand some lateral stability. I decided to raise the lip of the stand about an inch at the front over the tank to minimize the black edge around the bottom of the tank. With these Latched on the stand really felt quite sturdy, a comforting improvement on the previous stage.

This is basically shows how the rim was fixed in place


And with that done the stand begins to look a lot more like, well, a stand. in this picture I've run the rail around the base.


And here you can see the rail around the top. At this point I put the tank in to make sure that the space between the rail was about right, and it fit like a charm.
 
AHoskins;1163584; said:
I don't see any photos.
Click to expand...

Are you waiting long enough for them to load? I can see them fine.

I'd rather not post any more on this page because it'll kill the load time. When it gets to the next page I'll throw some more up.
 
I just changed some of the settings in my MFK gallery, can someone tell me if the pictures are now visible to nayone other than me?

Thanks,
 
Anyway, on with the thread.

So for the sides and the front around the doors I thought that I'd do 1"x3", just for a bit of a different look. Had to mess around a bit to get it to sit flush, but not too bad. This portion is not really anything to do with the structural integrity of the stand so is generally much less stressful, if you balls it up, no-one will know if it looks OK and doesn't fall off. But before I did that I started to consider putting a real base on it. I mean it's better that just having the stuff inside all over the floor.

So for the base I picked up a piece of the thinest cheapest plywood I could find that looked reasonable. Then I cut out a shape which went around all of the legs nicely and slotted it in. This part took several times going back and forth and sanding it down. My philosophy was to always cut less off than you need rather than more, then trim it later. If you cut off too much at the start then you're screwed.

So here's a picture of the base:

I thought that the base might just sit flat, but very thin plywood likes to warp, and if it got wet it'd only get worse, so I decided to tack it to the frame.

As for the sides, not the base was done I could get started. It wasn't that bad really, although with practice I could have made things a bit neater. Maybe I was a bit hasty, but I could also do with a few more things, namely a plane. Sanding is bloody hard work if you need to take off a couple of mm.

Anyway ,below you can see the work in progress.



 
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