Possible topic for Feb Meeting?

Laura and Jim will be hosting the May meeting this Saturday the 12th and it will be the usual of food, drinks, raffle and fun.
 
Doors will be open at 6:00 pm for social talk and the meeting will start at 7:00.  Parking gets a little tight and the city says you can't park on 4th but there is a parking lot a block away.   Meeting is usually held in the backyard so feel free to bring your favorite lawn chair, weather permitting of course.

If you need address/directions, contact a club member.

Best if you park at Mini Mall (where the spaghetti establishment use to be)
 
You will get to see his new frag tank set up in the making.
 
Hope to see you there!

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[VickiG]

Hi everyone. We are looking forward to seeing you at our house this Saturday night for the club meeting.  Unfortunately, we have come up with a possible topic - how to fix a large crack in the euro-bracing of our tank!!  (See 'Big Trouble in Little Ocean').  If all you acrylic experts (listening, Les?) could look at our tank and provide some suggestions, we can go from there.   If it is not able to be fixed, we might be sending home some critters with some of you to fish-sit while we do a tear down and repair!      

See you all there - and you tank guys put your thinking caps on! 

[Les]

I suppose we could do that. Vicki, if you could email me some pics of the cracking/crazing along with the dimensions of the crack then I can get an idea of how to go about this. You can email me at lesjpeterson@gmail.com if that would be easier.

[VickiG]

I will e-mail these to you too, Les, but in case others want to see what we are dealing with.  The acrylic is 1/2" thick and the crack is about 3" long and about 3/32" wide at the widest opening.  It goes all the way through the acrylic.  On one side of the crack it has dropped down about 1/32" lower than the other side.  On the side of the tank, where the Euro-bracing is glued to the side piece, there is also a small crack, about 1/2" long.  It is not all the way through the thickness of the acrylic yet but you can see a void in there.  I couldn't get a good photo of the smaller crazing line along the side seam.  Darrel thinks now that a noise he heard Saturday evening, when he thought something fell off a shelf in our pantry, was probably the tank cracking.  Since our house is on a concrete slab, the only cause he can think is the freezing/thawing of the ground lately may have made a crack in our slab causing the tank to shift ever so slightly.  Let me know if other info or pictures would be helpful.

[Les]

I don't think this is from the house shifting. This is more than likely caused by the heat from the metal halides warming the acrylic and then a fish splashing that hot acrylic and the quench factor causes the cracking. This can be fixed in place by laying a bead of Weld On 40 across the gap and allowing it to cure. We will need to drain the tank down about an inch or so from the top just so we can tape the bottom of the crack. This will keep the liquid Weld On 40 from dripping into the tank. If you still want we can do this as a presentation for the meeting as there are quite a few acrylic tanks around here.