Hood for 92 Gallon Corner Bowfront Aquarium

by Brian Verdine

I got an All-Glass 92 corner bow without a hood thinking I was up to the task of building one. Upon looking around for a decent set of plans, I came up pretty empty. I wanted something that would open in the front without having to hinge the top open (you'll see my lighting solution, which was the main reason) or without having to remove the hood whenever I needed to get in the tank. I also wanted it to jive with the All-Glass stand I already had. So, I set about making my own plans. This was designed for a reef, which requires a lot of light and generates quite a bit of heat. If you want to do something like this for freshwater, the design could probably be simplified and made smaller. For lighting, I knew it was going to be a softie/LPS tank. I had heard that lighting these tanks is a bit of a pain because of the corner shape and that lighting the front of the bow could be challenging. So, I focused the design around my lighting needs. I decided on 3x24" T5 retro fits arrayed in a fan shape. The tank has been running for a few months now and everything seems to be pretty happy. Disclaimer: I am not a carpenter and there were probably some fancier/easier ways of building this thing. That said, I built it in my kitchen with a jigsaw, a cross cut hand saw, a mitre box, a sander, some clamps, a drill, a square, and screws (which is all I really had at my disposal). Here goes... First, I traced the bow of the tank onto a sheet of 3/4" plywood and cut 4 bow shaped pieces approximately 1.5" wide (2 for the hood and 2 for the doors). Then I made a frame of 1x3" pieces and arranged them as seen in the pics. I used a 2x4 on the front of the bow to help stabilize the design, since without a nice strong piece in the front, not much stopped it from flexing side to side. This also served as a stop for the doors.

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I then lined the sides with 1/4" plywood, leaving an opening in the back for cords to go through. These sides were also cut to hang down past the top of the tank to hold the hood from sliding forward. These should be cut to go as far down past the top of the tank as you want the front to go (I went about 1.5"). The top is lined with 2 x 1/4" pieces. The hole in the top is offset so that I could set a piece of egg crate right into the hole. This way, the egg crate sits flush inside. I hoped it would help keep the lights pretty cool by having the top open (avoiding big loud fans). I may eventually add some smaller fans since keeping the bulbs cool is supposed to extend their life, but it seems to stay pretty cool as is.

Another view

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Egg crate in

After getting it all skinned out, I was ready to make some doors. I used clamps to space the two extra bows the correct amount apart and started adding appropriately lengths of 1x4's (which match the slat size for the stand). The slats were made to hang down about 1.5" past the top edge of the tank and go up past the top of the hood top. I used the extra hanging over the top to put my latches and so that I could easily grab and open the doors. I simply drilled the bows and put screws through them into the backs of the slats. This way, you won't see any screws at all until you open the doors. Remember as you do this to start with the slat in the middle where you'll cut the bow in half to get two doors. From there, you just jam the boards tight together and make sure you keep everything square. A note on the slats, I sanded the edges down on each of the sides so that if you look down from the top it looks more like a trapezoid than a square (take a gander at the doors on an All-Glass stand and you'll see that they are "wedged" like that). This lets you get the fronts of the slats flush with each other so that there are no gaps, otherwise, the backs of the sides would hit and you'd have larger gaps between the slats in the front. Another note...you might have to cut a slat or two in half on the edges to make the slats go flush to the sides of the hood when you get to the edges of the bow.

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I then attached the doors with regular old butt hinges. These are the only pieces of hardware that show from the front, and it's only the rounded part where the two pieces are joined together. Unfortunately, I don't have a good pic of this, but you can see the silver sticking out on the right hand side of the picture below.

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For lighting, as described above, I used 3 x 24" T5's arrayed in a fan (see pic). I put two sets of moonlights in between the reflectors on the cross brace. I arranged them so that I have two actinics on the outside, a 10,000K and actinic in the middle two, and two 10,000Ks on the two in between (just a note, it might take some extra messing about, but I think you could get at least another set of T5's in without overlapping reflectors...I just didn't need that much light or the added expense). Lights off

All on

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As you can see, the array of bulbs is a little off center, but you can fix any inconsistencies you might notice (I never have) by just tilting the reflectors some. Since they are attached to the bulbs, they easily move. I have the two outside actinics tilted in quite a bit to reach the middle of the tank without a noticeable dark spot. I made the inside white to reflect any stray light...hopefully back into the tank. The hood on and painted

Now some full tank shots to give an idea of how the lighting looks. I have a crappy camera, so these aren't great, but you'll get the general idea. I have a pistol shrimp that's been plowing a lot, so there's some fog in the water. I also turned on the lights after they cycled off, so some stuff is a wee bit angry looking. The bulbs in these pics are TRU T5's that came, for free, with the retros. I will definitely be swapping out the actinics with superactinics once I wear these ones out a little bit. That might make it blue enough that I have to mess around with my lighting combo. However, right now, I just can't make myself mess with a free light combo when everything seems to be doing fine. Phase 1: 2 x Actinics http://www.scribd.com/brian_verdine Page 7 of 9

Phase 2: 3 x Actinics / 1 x 10,000K

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Thanks for looking. Hopefully this helps someone put together ideas to build something of their own. If there's anything I can answer about the set-up, or other pics to clarify how I did it, feel free to post or PM me.

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