Part one because of course Im waiting for the water to condition. OK, so at long last, after years of wanting one its time to finally build a Maquarium. Ive been reading about it for years.
First issue is finding a bloody case. Every time I try to get one on eBay thats close, some loony want to buy the damn computer, even though its broken, and cant be resurrected without buying loads of stuff. So finally...I find one. £50! for a computer thats completely useless. It just beggars belief. Anyway - it turns out its actually round the corner from me. The bloke needless to say looked really pleased about the purchase, even though he only got £40 quid because of course eBay take a totally unreasonable 15% by the time you include Paypal - but hey, thats the breaks I guess.
You of course need a Macintosh compact for this. Nobody is going to be doing that with anything earlier than a Classic unless they did it years ago when the bloody things didn't cost a crazy amount of money. I had a Classic II - whats that, 1992? maybe. I actually have a Classic that has a new HDD with like 20GB drive and a network breakout device but thats another project story as I need a Mac running Appletalk - like OSX Lion or something to network it to a new machine.
I used the Apple Fitter plans, and a lot is covered in that so not much point going over it - this is my experience of doing it, not a how to. And some seem to be about bending the tank in bits - sod that, I had a friend that builds fish tanks for a living use his bench cutter to do mine, but I guess a fine tooth saw will do. It very difficult to do a less than 1mm cut in all honesty.
I get the case and cut it up. A dremmel is really handy for this. I can't imagine how you would be doing it otherwise. Its a bit of a pain - the plastic is now well old, and a bit crusty.
Next thing is the glass - I used polycarbonate ordered from eBay. 5 sheets of A4 does the trick. Irritatingly they turned up not quite A4. Luckily they were big enough anyway. I chose to use poly over glass because - glass, its nice an all, but a bit of a nightmare with the brittle thing. I think £30 for the poly. So Tank construction. The apple fritter method gives you everything in American measurements of course - and why not, metric has only been around since the 1700s.
Here are the metric measurements in cm.
| Pane | Width | Height | Extra for trapezium |
|---|---|---|---|
| Front | 22.2 | 25.0 | |
| Back | 21.6 | 24.8 | |
| Bottom | 22.2 | 22.2 | |
| Sides | 21.9 | 24.8 | 19.4 |
join that c shape into a square and you have your parallelogram shape.
Again the fixing sequence is in Fritter. Pretty easy to work out. So then you glue. I used a strong poly glue - the type you use to fix plastic model airplanes with. It bonded perfectly first time no water loss.
Thats it for now until the water is up to quality.
