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Tank Rack How-two

Sonny Disposition

Active Member
Richard had mentioned that he was interested in building a new fish rack. Here's a pictoral, of my end-of-year project to consolidate space and lighting for some of my tanks. I hope Richard and everyone else who's planning a new rack finds it useful.

Essentially, the tank is composed of four rectangles held together by cross ties and struts. (There may be other ways to do it, but this is the way I knew, so I went with it.)


Each of the rectangles is made up of interlocking lengths of two by fours: four on each side, eight all together. All the two by fours are held together with 2 1/2 inch course tread dry wall screws.


The rectangles are held together by cross ties:


The cross ties are reinforced by struts, to push against the downward weight of the tanks and keep the rack from collapsing under the weight of the water:


I put the two smaller rectangles together first:


Followed by the larger rectangles:


Here's the completed rack, all put together. At this point, I learned that two by fours aren't cut very precisely, with minor variations in the size of each beam. Taken together, and on top of the imprecise cuts of my skill saw, I couldn't get the two toop cross ties to line up underneath all four rectangles. I had to cut, them, put them together again, and hold the two halves of the rack together with angle bolts. (If I had it to do all over again, I'd have bought a radial arm saw, also called a "chop saw" which makes for much straighter cuts than a hand held circular saw.):


Here's the completed rack, with the tanks on top of it. The three top racks are ten gallons, the middle one is the 55 gallon long I won at a CCA raffle, and the three bottom tanks are 20 gallon highs. On the top rack, which is eye level for me, I keep fish that need close watching, like killies and holding females. The 55 is for bigger fish, and the bottom 20s are for catfish and other fish than don't need close watching.


There's also a shelf behind the 55 gallon long, for more tanks, or for pots of tomato seedlings, or whatever:
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