tims's blog

[tims]

Welcome to my Blog,

i will cover the tanks i have had, am starting and have up.

i hope you enjoy reading and sharing the adventure with me.


a big thanks to
gregt, skanky,jeff, geoff,tom, Casey , Doug, alice, shirley and Cath who took pity on me wheni first started to post... i am REALLY glad geoff does not recall the UGF question i had!

[tims]

Well to start off with,
I have been keeping tanks for about all of my walking and talking life. From catching sand sharks by hand as a child to now keeping a reef tank.
the First reef tank i managed to keep was in a nice hexagon tank. Boy i will never do that one again. But we all learn from our mistakes..
the First post ( or at least one of the first posts) on TRT was to ask geoff why not use a UGF with CC..I think that was in a think tank thread about DSB's no less.
here are a few pictures of my First tank and it's makes

[tims]

the First Hex tank was a tank given to me by my brother who did not want it. I had that up and running for about 6 months wheni heard a peeing sound one night or shoudl i say one morning (4 am)!!!. One of the seams had a pin hole in it and the tank was peeing a nice 4 -5 arc of salt water in to the middle of the carpeted living room! Of course the hole was about half way down the tank.

[tims]

As you can tell by the pictures the "reef life" was slow to be added. oNce i was able to fix the hole in the tank , it ran for a good week or so then another hole in another seam started, this caused me to buy a 62 hex tank from my LFS.
this held a nice looking sailfin tang, a baby batfish and a foxface..along with a few damsels and a LMB and a flying gunard!....

[tims]

a few more pictures for ya. Sorry i dont have a great clear picture of the gunard. He was quite a neat looking and fascinating fish to see "flying" around the tank! it really did look like he was hang gliding ...

[tims]

I totally loved having the flame scallops, but i only was able to have them live a good 7-8 months, maybe one of these days iwill try and "dirty" tank and see what can be done to keep them going. Watching these guys move around the tank was something really cool. It was like watching the "Pac -man " game..

In thte pictures you can the nice Flower anemone i had, it really was quite nice to have, never had any toruble with it at all. Well until the nice 25 $ coral banded shrimp that i had just released in to the tank walking right in to the mouth after 15 minutes in the tank..
all i could do was watch with my jaw open..

[tims]

oh in case ya dont belive me abouthte sharks
it was in 1976 i was 8 years old then, in Florida at the beach camping with my family and freinds. on a dare i was told to stand in the middle of them, i decided to do one better.. i even tried very hard to convince my mom to keep it inthe sink of the camper until we got home...

[tims]

here are a few pictures of the elagance coral after the 4 $ condy walked in to it

[tims]

right now i have a70 gallon running and a 10 gallon nano, the ten can be seen in thte nano forum under the nano contest.I did not have great success with it at the start,but it is coming along much better.

i have been starting a 120 gallon tank now for a good year. i am trying to get the record for the longest tank build!

[tims]

i managed to pick up a bunch of used 50 galllon cubish tanks, some already drilled to be hooked either togeather, or for pumps. all were free!
i did give a few away , two went to other TRT members.
i will be using one for a sump for the 120g. the rest i hope to set up a frag growing tank. My idea for it is to grow frags for all TRT members, they will be free when it is done. at least one Soft coral tank and one LPS tank.

[tims]

i managed to talk Geoff in to doing a PDF of his skimmer.skimmer.pdf
this way we and i have it so we can look at it when we need to..
thakns again Geoff. you have always been a good friend and inspration.

[tims]

in the thread "tims bigin' tank" we had talked a lot about what i / we were going ot do with it.
the sump i came up with was something like this..


but now the skimmer will be a seperate piece and plumbed in to the sump..

thanks to Casey... the lighting system that i WAS going to use was 4 x110w VHO. but once he started to post pictures of the Corals he was getting..( boy he was suttle) that i need to have MH's on the tank. so i did some looking and then TRT had the auctions.. i lost the 1st auction by 2$
but when the next set came around i won the 1st of 2 250 mH lights

[tims]

i picked up the second one shortly after tax time.. ya gota love refunds...
other than the VHO to add to the Mh lights i am pretty set with it.
of course the gang had some suggestions on the sump and we came up with this.

[tims]

Well i built the cabinet for the tank over sized. i wanted to have room to work under the tank.


this did not work out so well.. the cabinet was WAY TOO BIG.. i had to drag it out to the porch and cut it down...

[tims]

started the side pieces for the cabinet, and had to re think the sump now. since i had to cut the cabinet down a good bit.



i now have two shelves up and the end piece in place, that will be removeable. i hope to start the framing for the light system in the next month.
After some discussion with Vince ( VWD) the lighting will be on a rolling track, this way i will be able to access the lights when they need to be cleaned or changed.
i will try and take soem updated pictures of were the 120 is at...
i still need to order pumps for it. but i did pick up icecap ballasts for 4 x 250 w Mhs recently..