Hey you guys, this Andrew Esquivel here, back with another tutorial. Today I'm going to
be expanding upon a concept that another gentleman on YouTube went over and gave me the idea
to try and replicate what he did. I encourage you to check out his YouTube page and check
out his video as he is the inspiration for this. More or less, what we're going to be
doing is making a fish tank divider with some stuff we can get at Wal-Mart for very, very
cheap. Now, the fish tank dividers he went into are of common sizes but what I want to
do is talk about one size that is very hard to find dividers for, which is the 40 gallon
breeder. Now I went to Wal-Mart and they have this stuff called Canvas Designer. As you
can see here, it's plastic mesh with tiny holes and yes, some very tiny baby fish would
probably be able to get through it. We can stagger that with two of them if we want.
More or less, for keeping adolescent and adult fish separate, this should do quite nicely.
I found this at Wal-Mart in the arts and crafts kind of section. If you'll notice, it's 12
inches by 18 inches, which is perfect because a 40 gallon breeder in 18 inches wide. We
can get rid of that. It comes with three of these for only a few dollars. We can get rid
of this little thingy here. Essentially what we're going to do is because it's not tall
enough, we're going to cross section them in a manner that allows us to have two at
the same time. To do that, we're going to use some string and a needle and we're going
to weave in and out on all of these. Now it's going to take some time to do it but once
it's done, it'll make a nice, strong connection. If you don't want to do it like that, you
could always use aquarium grade silicone to combine the two pieces. I prefer using some
string and a needle. I think it's a better solution. That way you don't have to wait
two days for the silicone to cure and become nontoxic. So we're going to go with that.
More importantly we need some rigidity. He pointed this out. This is report covers. What
you'll notice is these. These are important because, believe it or not, regular fish tank
dividers use the exact same thing. And he goes over this in his video. This is where
I got the idea from. These basically are designed to hold some pages together and they work
just as well to hold the canvas together. You just slide it in where the divided would
go. This little thing comes with six. It was only like $1.50 or so. Get these plastic pages
that you don't really need but if you could find these just by themselves, that's good
too. We're going to start up in the middle of the cross section to reinforce it. We can
work our way around however we see fit. The nice thing about making your own is these
come already premade flat. The ones that you buy in the store that are actual tank dividers
come rolled so they don't have a nice square flat rigid form. To fix that, you could always
use a hairdryer and heat up the plastic and it will form to whatever the surface is that
you have it on. So let's go ahead and build this and see how it looks.Now if you have
some normal string like I do, you actually don't need a thread and needle, although it
can be handy. If you want to deal with the fray at the end, just simply turn on your
stove, put the end in the heat for just a second, and it burns the end to a nice, solid
tip. So that way it's easier just to poke it through the holes.So this is what it will
look like when it's completed. I'm not going to lie, hand stitching every single piece
to go all the way across took quite a bit of patience but it gets easier once you get
a rhythm going towards the center. The beginning and the end are probably the hardest part
of it. We just tie a knot around on this end and on that end and we can add the plastic
side supports to give it rigidity. Once you have your supports on for the time being,
measure out the top to bottom, the height of your tank and cut accordingly. The nice
thing about his stuff is it's really easy to keep a straight line and we don't have
to worry about this top portion because those little filer things we had, these are going
to go on top as well as the bottom and the sides. As you can see, they fit on just like
the stuff that comes with the breeder nets that you get at the store. So this is what
the entire thing will look like when it's done. You'll notice we didn't have enough
to cover every single square inch of the perimeter but that's okay, you would just put this end
down into the sand bed where the fish aren't going to go in anyway.Okay, so because the
inside width and height of the tank is different than the outside, I had to take it out and
do some re-measuring. Okay, so now that I finally got it in the tank you were probably
wondering how it gets held up. We use suction cups. Just putting suction cups at key points
helps keep it where it should be. I mean, you could always do a little bit of adjusting
but the nice thing about doing a custom wall is you can get it exact. So looks to be pretty
good, I think actually. Especially compared to the old one, which was far too small. This
is why I only could have the water down to this height, because that was as high as the
store-bought one goes. Okay, so you may have noticed a few of the fish got by right here
because there was a little gap. I made it just barely too short. So what I did is I
pulled these white pieces out a little further. And if you need a little extra buffer in case
you went a little too far, just get another one of these little plastic sticks and just
wedge it like you see right there. It should help close the gap. But if you don't make
that mistake then you've pretty much got it. So just use suction cups to hold it in place.Here
is the end result. The tank is finally at its fullest capacity. I used one of the previous
sticks I had to make the gap just a little taller, that's what you see in green. Thanks
for watching guys. Hope it helped.