Hi, everybody Joey here again and welcome back
so today, I'm going to be showing you how to build an aquarium stand a
do-it-yourself aquarium stand
Now there's several reasons. Why you might [want] to build an aquarium stand and the top three reasons in my opinion are the following?
Number one reason is always for me going to be the strength of a do-it-yourself stand as opposed to a store-bought stand
Not to mention the price is much lower to simply Build it yourself
The ease of building it is definitely
Underrated they're very easy to build need a minimal [amount] of tools, so it's pretty simple and straightforward [I]
also like the customizability of
A do-it-yourself stand you can basically build whatever you want however you want however tall however short long wide Etc
second most
Commonly used reason to build your own stand is pretty simple
you might have built or you might own a custom sized aquarium if
You do you're forced to basically build your own stand for it because the stands not going to be commonly available
If it is it's going to be pretty expensive
another reason and then the last reason in my top three to build your own stand is the ability to
Make your stand fit in with the rest of the decor of your house
essentially having your
Aquarium
Almost like a piece [of] furniture in your home
So those are the top three reasons why you might want to consider building your own stand?
Now before you get started. There's some things you're going to need to know and
A lot [of] things you're going [to] need to consider first of all you're going to need to consider
How [taller] you're going to need your stand?
That's usually depicted by whether or not you're going to be viewing [your] stand standing up or sitting?
Down in my case. I'm going to be sitting down a lot when I do this [tax] stand and so it's a very [short] stand
Something else you need to consider is whether or not?
You're going to have
filtration hidden under the stand so if you have a canister filter or a sump system of some sort you need to consider that as
Well these two things come into play when your design your overall stand
the last thing you're probably going to need to consider is whether or not you're building it inside of our room or
Outside of our room what I mean by this is quite
simple if you're building it inside [of] the room
And it's never going to need to come out of that room and don't worry about how tall you make it?
It doesn't necessarily [need] to fit through a door
But if you're building, it outside in a garage or somewhere like [that]
You're going to make sure you're going to need to make [sure] that your stand can actually fit through your door so measure your doorways
Before you build your stand so all of these things you need to consider before you even move forward with the stand now
[in] this video I'm going to be going over all the materials and how to specifically build your own aquarium stand
The stand I'm building is
The the Blueprints are basically good [for] almost any [sized] aquarium even up to 300 gallons
I've used this exact plan to build a stand for a 300 gallon tank before and it worked very well
Anything after that you're going to need to get into some bigger materials like four by fours and two lights in this video
You're going to see a lot of 2x4. [it's] being used
So anyways, let's get started with getting your two by fours cut up first and how you're going to need to cut them
Okay, so the first thing we're going to want to do in order to cut up our two by fours is get a cheap meter
Saw basically all this is is a meter saw that it has a spinning blade and it cuts things straight f
[I] can also
You know do different types of cuts in terms of the angle that it cuts at
That's good. I
Paid about fifty [dollars] for the Sauce is basically a no-name song
The reason I got it was very simple. I'm use it exclusively to cut two by fours for my aquarium stands
[I've] built at least 20 or more stands using this saw alone and for 50 bucks. I couldn't go [wrong]
Again, you don't have to get this you can have your local hardware store cut it for you
Basically to get started I measured where my first cut will be this is [a] 96 inch long
2x4 and
I need a 48 inch long peace so I just mark where I'm cutting with a pen and
That's where I'm going to cut it along just simply cut it straight down
now
Once I get that piece in order to make sure all my pieces are going to be identical
[I] need three more of these
I'm not going to go ahead and measure each individual piece what I'm going to do is take my pen and
four pencil and put an x on the piece that I need
What that x means is that's my pattern piece from now on to make sure that all my other pieces are identical to it
Once I cut this I can simply lay this piece on top of another
2x4 and [mark] it off where I need [it] to be cut saves you a lot of time
And you [don't] have to keep measuring things out doing it that way you're going to be off a little bit here and there
This ensures that you're always going to be on mark
Now I've marked where I'm going to cut it and I'm going to cut on the outside of that mark the reason being is though
The pen Mark is 48 inches if I cut directly down it. I'm going to lose a
Fraction of an inch you know, it doesn't sound like a lot, but overall it could cause me problems
So I'm going to cut on the outside of it because I'm accounting for the thickness of the saw blade
so
Now that we know how to cut up the two by fours and a little tip on creating pattern pieces
I'm going to go ahead and cut up everything that I need and we're going to move on to the next step
So there you have it guys I got all [my] wood cut up [everything's] ready to go. I'm going to start putting it together now
Don't let any of this confuse you just yet
I haven't told you what [the] cut how long it to cut it or anything like that
But we're going to we're going to discuss all that progressing through the video so let's start out by putting it together
Okay, so starting it
We got the frame of the bottom of the stand basically this is how long the stand will [be] and this is the width
This is what the aquarium is going to be sitting on or it could be the bottom
But we need two of these so what we have here [and] how I cut it was very simple
The length of the aquarium that I'm using is 48 inches long. It's also 36 inches wide
If this is first aquarium, you know do-it-yourself stands
You should probably give yourself an extra inch so in my case
If this is my first build instead of making it 48 inches long
I'd make it 49 inches long just to give myself some room to [play] with
So essentially with mine. I made it 48 inches long. That's the outside piece
The inside pieces are not 36 inches wide the reason being is very very simple
the 2x4 is on the ends are giving it an extra width a two by fours width and
Height is not really [2x4]
it's
More so one and a half by three and a half
So if I put a 1 and a half here and a one and a half here that gives me three extra inches
so the width of this piece really only needs to be 33 inches which gives me a combined width of
36
so now I'm going to take my wood screws and
Drill two on each end - in here - and there to any other ends, and they're going on top of each other
[basically] one, and then the other inside of the on the sides of the frame here, I need two of these
So I've already cut them and they're ready to go
I'm going to screw them together, and we're going to move on to the next step
Okay, so now I'm ready to
Move on to the next step [I've] created two of these that I mentioned a second ago a top and a bottom
These are pretty flimsy right now because they only have two screws on the ends here now
the screws I'm using our number 8
two and a half inch wood screws
[the] reason why I'm using two and a half inch is because the
2x4 is one and a half inches thick [so] [it] goes through the 2x4 and then another inch
Into the other piece of wood which is typically what's needed?
Now I can take this piece off. We're not going to be using that right now
Next thing I'm going to be doing
Is that again?
[these] are basically I call them guides
What that means is one of these is going to determine I overall height of the aquarium since I'm only going with a short aquarium
Stand what I did was
[determine] [that] I would like to have a stand that's 28 inches tall that's going to allow me to
Fit it up the door if I ever need [to] basically it's going to end up being both 27 and [1/2] inches tall now
So what I needed to do was cut four of these
To the height of the tank [I] also need to consider whether I'm putting plywood or styrofoam on top of it
[so] I have to take that into an account as well, but these are 27 inches long
and I've got four of them these are going to go into [each] corner of
the Tank
You're going [to] be drilling through the side here, and then this side here two screws here, and two this way
Through this side so two side by side and two on top of each other
[and] that's basically it so I'm going to get all four on there, and then we're going to move to the next step
Okay, so now we've got the all four sub guides in place as you can see it's starting to look like a stand still
Want to do though next step is simply putting the other top
Brace on top of
On top of the aquarium stand here, how we're going to do that is simple. We're just going to move this out [of] the way
For a couple seconds here
We'll go ahead and grab the other
frame Lay that down
and
then simply
Put this inside
Should fit snugly if it doesn't well make it fit now
Going up going in straight because I'm not putting it down straight down. [let] me put it in on an Angle, [so]
[there] we have it looking like a stand right now
not really
Still wants to do. I'm going to go ahead and screw each end in here now
we're going to move on to the next step basically I'm
Screwing it in the same as I did up here
So two side-by-side here, and then two screws on top of each other on the other side
Connecting
the outside frame to the guides
Making sure that your floor that [you're] building your stand on is level is extremely important
So you can have a nice flat [surface] on top
So far so good, so I'm going [to] get ahead and start screwing everything together
[you'll] notice
I'm not using wood glue to glue this stand together wood glue for a stand like this in my opinion is a waste of time
Glues not going to hold your tank together when you're putting you know several thousand pounds on top of it
I think it's a waste of money
and you know a waste of time and
makes a mess that is all completely unneeded the screws are just basically holding it together and the woods going to support the
Tank that's a personal opinion. Go ahead and use wood glue if you want anyways moving on to the next step
okay, guys, so the stand is basically coming together like
pretty Nicely right now
Now if I were to send an aquarium on top of this all of the weight is not going to be on this
piece of wood here
It's going to be all on the screws because the tank is going to be sitting here
Especially [if] they have a glass tank with a bottom trim on it
Which means all that weight is going to be distributed around the perimeter of the aquarium basically being put on here?
Because of this we can't just have the weight of the aquarium on the screws themselves. We need something to [go] between here and
here and [that] will take the full weight of
the aquarium
[that's] where two more pieces of wood for each corner is going to come into play
[basically] all we're doing is putting them in each corner
like so
You know they're going to be tight fits
because it's the exact measurements that I needed so a rubber mallet banging them into place is going to be a good idea and
Then we simply
screw them into place
Now for the two by fours where they should go is really set there's a crease right here
We need the side 2x4 to cover it
Basically what that means is that the weight from both of these two by fours is going to be distributed evenly?
Along here instead of all this 2x4 on this one all this on here basically it's going to increase the strength overall
So now what this will do is transfer all the way from the aquarium to each one of these two by fours
I'm going to be running two on each corner
So that gives me the total of eight of these two by four so eight two by fours are going to be holding up this
tank now
this tank
These dimensions so far are good for a four foot. Tank. I'm going to show you
Later [on] [in] the video on how to make these exact same plans for this stand build to be applied to larger tanks as well
But first let's get all the corners in place
So there you [have] it guys [the] tank is just about done now
I've got all [of] the structural support in place all this was was two two by fours again
[cornered] and screwed together and
screwed it into the
Corners on all four Corners, and this is essentially what's going [to] take all the weight of the aquarium?
We still have some more bracing to do and these are equally important
Essentially, we're going to take a more of these
longer boards that go along the width of the aquarium
Just like that
Now these are going to both get screwed into the sides and into the corners allowing this to have more
Strength if the aquarium decides to sway or get shoved a little bit
We're going to do one for each side on the top as well as the bottom now
That will basically
Bring this almost to complete. Let's get these on and then I'll show you the last step
Okay guys, so that was basically it the stand is finalized
finalized for glass aquarium
With a bottom trim that basically [elite]
raises the glass off of the actual stay and all of that weight is put onto the trim of the
aquarium meaning that all the
Weight will be around the perimeter of the tank so you can basically go ahead and set your glasses wearing on top of this
If you want some reassurance that your aquarium is sitting on a flat [and] true service
throw a sheet of plywood on top of this and
Call it done, then you can move on to wrapping it or something like that
Now I'm going to be using an acrylic tank and this stand isn't going to be cutting it
I'll tell you why the acrylics tank has a full acrylic bottom if I put it on this
It's going to say [right] down the middle
So what I had to do is very simple
I'm going to take more [of] these long two by fours the width of the tank
Set them inside evenly and screw them in place
This is going to help distribute the weight a little bit better
And I'm going to put two here one here the bottom. I don't need them
Once those are in place. I'm also going to take a sheet of plywood and
simply throw
That right on top
It's like this
Okay, and [then] that's you know screw it down into place
Then I can put a sheet of styrofoam on top of that and put my acrylic tank down
And then you know I can move on to the rest of this tank
So let me go ahead and get all that together, and then we'll move forward
So that was basically it the stand is done
I can now have my aquarium to the top of it again. [the] top line would top is definitely optional
But if you have a an acrylic aquarium, it's not optional you need it
especially the
Supports that we added underneath of it
Now you might [be] wondering what the total cost of this was well
It was actually very minimal for example the two by fours cost me about two dollars a piece. I use nine of them
That's 18 bucks the screws. I use 96 of them about a hundred of them for about five bucks
So we're at twenty three dollars there
And that's all you know essentially you're really going to need if you're going to need to add the plywood top
LevI paid 12 or 13 bucks for that
So we're not now at about
$35 and I got a hundred and fifty gallons stand out of it
It's not a bad deal took me about 30 45 minutes to build it if that nuts [being] taking my time
so that was essentially it if
You need to make a bigger stand this stand design will work for that as well
All you need to do is add more supports to the center if you're going to be going [5] [6] [7] [8] feet long
and what I mean by [that] is by
Doing the same thing you did on the corners and putting them in the middle. So you have a
2 by [4] on the outside [bar] sorry on the inside next to the inside of these two by fours
And then one in the middle that takes the weight of the aquarium
For a 6-foot tank, you're probably only going to need one in the middle 7 & 8 fleet tanks [8-foot] tank support
You're probably going to need [2] in the middle
This design is good for tanks up to 300 gallons at least I
know this because I built a 300 gallon stanfill for 300 gallon aquarium if
You're going bigger than 300 gallons. You're going to want to take a look into
[2] by [8] and four by fours to make your aquarium
stand
So that was it [I] showed you guys exactly how to build it how to cut it
everything you needed to know we broke down the cost and
[they'll] showed you the exact blueprint of what you needed to know you
[have] any questions
Or you like to share some pictures of your [do-it-yourself] projects make sure you check out diy fish Keepers calm in the next video
We're going to complete the stand we're going to finish wrapping it adding the doors and hardware Etc
I'm also going to be making a canopy for this stand that the will sit on top of the aquarium
So make [sure] you stay tuned for that
So we'll see is next time and thanks for watching