My new 180 stand

[millerdog]

So my wife and I final came to the conclusion that we needed to up size our main FOWLR tanks. We had a 100 gal and a 75 gal in the living room taking up all wall space. And the fish had out grown the 100 gal especial a FREE Lopezi Tang we got from Saltwaterfish.com that was only .5 inch to start with and inside a year its pushing a foot. Over the Christmas holiday we found and settled on a 180 gal that came with a DIY 60 gal sump and an Iwaki 1153. The previous owners had it sitting on cinderblocks so I get to make the stand hood and as you can see from the pic the tank has been drilled in the side for the returns, don’t know why that would be done myself.
Bringing the monster home



There was also about 1/4 inch of sand 25lb of rock one brackish water figure eight puffer and two 18" snowflake eels. The will all be going up stairs in our 60 gal breeder that has been holding my live rock. Till I can get the tank stand made and the tank is ready for peeps.

[stoneroller]

Wow. That's gonna be fun. The side returns could be used for a peninsula style setup, coming out 90 degrees from the wall instead of parallel.

[millerdog]

So the tank sat in my garage for a short time while I searched online for stand/hood inspiration. For the stand its self I went with this RC thread for the structure.
http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=1169964
As for what I wanted was a mixture of these

or

and

This last one is of my father-in-laws new entertainment center he had just built. Like Hobogato he enjoys doing and is quite good at carpenter in his spare time and let me pick his brain for ideas and I even had some of my own we had tossed around during his building.
I showed my ideas to the house hold approval team (wife and the cats) and was told they wanted to have visual access to both the front and back of the tank. So my first idea of painting the back was thrown out of the water and we would be pulling the tank an additional 18" off the wall.

[millerdog]

So with the tank standing off the wall I needed to make a stand uniform on all sides so I wasn't able to make the stepping in sides that I had wanted for the total structure and ended up with a large rectangle.
This is a picture of the total structure.

I'd started skinning it with 1/4 Burch. In the stand I used all 2x4 but the top that the stand will be sitting on is 2x6 for the extra strength.
The tank stand is 30" high and I made small 8" side for the plumbing and electrical wires on the right side I want to end that up being a book shelf for our growing fish book collection.
I used this piece of 1x to give me a uniform height to cover the tanks trim.

[hobogato]

looks great so far, i cant wait to see where you go with it