Finally finished my skimmer

[Joshua]

I'm sorry I didn't take many pics of the build process because I was trying to rush this through due to having 250 lbs of curing live rock already stinking up the house. Finally got it all plumbed up and running yesterday, it immediately started pulling mass quantities of goo but it'll take about a week to fully break in so that I can fine tune it. Skimmer ended up at 56" tall (was aiming for 48" tall) with 2" PVC input tube for more air/water contact time and a 6" main tube, skimped on everything due to time, went without the keyholes, without a flange on the lid, flat gasket on the cup, no custom input tube used PVC instead, etc... but it'll get the job done. Here are some random shots, that's a 5 gallon bucket in the shot for reference.

[Jeff]

looks good joshua.

[prof]

Pretty cool. I love diy skimmers.

[Joshua]

This thing is really kicking some butt but it's kinda picky. As soon as my wife starts frying something in the kitchen the foam collapses for at least an hour. Also I put in a new filter sock on the tank and the skimmer went nuts. I had to almost completely block off the air to get it to quit overflowing. I guess maybe there was some soap or something on that filter sock but I pulled it out of the pile with the rest of them. I'm not too concerned with any of this until it breaks in though, gonna give it until Monday and then start trying to fine tune it which will be a blast considering I have a ball valve on there instead of a gate valve.

[d3rryc]

I'd love to see the plans!

[Joshua]

I'd love to see the plans!

Me too.

[d3rryc]

LOL! Not as helpful as I might have hoped...

[Joshua]

haha, sorry. I did everything off the top of my head. It only hurt me in two places:
1) When I changed my mind to go from 1" pipe to 2" pipe after finding a 2" bulkhead in a bucket, re-drilled the input hole and realized I drilled too close to the side walls and now couldn't put the bulkhead flange on and had to put a false top on the skimmer box.
2) Cut the flange for the bottom tube too small so the plastic screws wouldn't fit because the heads were too wide and the top tube got in the way so I had to glue a bigger flange on top of the smaller one and re-do the flange on the top tube to match. The only reason I even had that flange is because I found a piece of 6" acrylic tube already cut from the last time I did this and thought it would be nice to use it.