Designing my steel stand

[jsodwi]

Oh man thank you everyone for the replies, makes me feel alot more confident about this project. My largest concern was the 73.5" span with no center bracing (my 400 has 1/2" square tubing but its got 2 sets of cross bracers in the middle for extra support; but honestly reading through and trying to figure out deflection calculations and everything else I was just becoming more and more confused as to if it would actually be safe enough.

I had included the gussets in the diagram as extra measure, it would be great to get rid of them so if you think its already overkill then that makes that pretty easy.

Lastly just want to give a shout out to pacumom; when we originally started talking about this project I actually stumbled on your build album from that tank (couldn't mistake that skimmer/overflow design anywhere) and oddly enough one of the questions I did have was how you were going to access the tank for maintenance being as high as it was. Now that that is answered I can go onto trying to figure out: what return pumps you plan on using/how you plan on heating it with/what thickness the acrylic on the tank actually is.

Anyways; now that my mind is at ease I'll be purchasing some materials over the next few weeks and will have to come back with build updates. Thanks again!

I did a few with no center bracing for customers. If it was a long span over 72" , I doubled up the 2x2 I'll see if I can find a pic of them. Or run a 2x4. I just doubled it up because I buy the 2x2 in bulk

 

[pacu mom]

Now that that is answered I can go onto trying to figure out: what return pumps you plan on using/how you plan on heating it with/what thickness the acrylic on the tank actually is.

Wonder no more. Biological filtration two Ultima II 4000s with Reeflo Barracuda Gold pumps with 120 Watt Lifegard Aquatics UV sterilizers connected to the returns. One will draw water from the sump and return to the main tank. The other will draw from the main tank. Mechanical filtration will consist of six RTL 100s connected to two Reeflo Hammerhead pumps. The sump tank will be basically a holding tank with some redundant filtration- stuff that has caught my eye browsing fish forums--5 gallons of Pond Matrix, Momotaro Bakki House media and a Clarity CL-3 protein skimmer run with a Reeflo Tarpon pump. I ordered my filtration stuff so long ago, that Hammerhead pumps are not available any more. Heating with several JBJ 1000 Watt heaters. Big delay in setting it up has been the background we decided we wanted. It has been one step forward and five steps backwards for over 3 years.

 

[DeepArow]

jsodwi - yes I would love to see pictures. I'm assuming when you doubled them up the 4" ran vertical?

P PacuMom - thats awesome! I honestly didn't realize that they stopped making the hammerheads, I was looking at them about 3 months ago for another project I worked on and ended up drastically changing the plan on. Are you planning to run the heaters directly in your sump? Have you considered installing something like the lifegard in line heater modules? Again I ask because I'm considering those for the other project as a way to increase heating efficiency and would be interested to see why someone might not want to run them.

 

[pacu mom]

No inline heaters--just throwing two or three heaters into the sump and calling it good.