i think it was eight years ago i built my first aquarium water bridge i was just doing
it for fun i thought that it would be cool to use some scrap glass that i had laying around
and kind of build a contraption that would allow fish to swim from one tank
into the other going above the tank increasing overall volume of the water as well as allowing
them to have a couple of different territories and get to see some fish swimming through their bridge
but building an aquarium bridge for two existing aquariums using materials that i already had on
hand that i was kind of limited to but coming up with a design that anybody could kind of copy and
replicate on their own so easily i thought what if i took it seriously and what if i
really tried to build something a little cooler mind you it's easy to build take a couple days
and build a pretty big tank heck you could take a week and build a couple of pretty big tanks
but of course my idea was to not only build one fish tank not two fish tanks but three
fish tanks and then figure out a way to build a bridge to connect all three but we made it happen
and here's how i did it okay so first and foremost i wanted to build this out of acrylic
simply because it's much easier to machine where i get my acrylic based on the sizes that i wanted
to go with and how much acrylic i wanted to buy i went with 10 millimeter thick cell cast acrylic i
also made this happen with one sheet of eight by four acrylic when you buy a piece or a sheet of
acrylic it comes eight feet long four feet wide i had to create a cut sheet first make sure all
the pieces and parts will fit into it and then of course i can cut it up myself with my 500 saw or
i could pay the acrylic place 40 bucks to cut it up with their 20 000 saw and just pick up all the
pieces and put it together so i get the acrylic home and i decide i'm going to start off with
the bridge it's the most complicated portion of the entire build and i have never built one like
this before that connects three aquariums so to be fair i was nervous i was nervous that i wasn't
going to make this uh be able to hold it together whether it would hold water or if i would be able
to build it with the exact dimensions to perfectly space these in a span that i wanted in the gallery
there's a lot of things to consider so i started off with the smallest pieces and like i said i've
never built one of these before so i don't know what we're going to be calling these pieces but
let's call these smaller spots like the archways then the back of the bridge with the top of the
bridge secured with the archways curing and the top panel on the side panel curing i went ahead
and attached the end panels what i was trying to create here was a structure so that i could put on
the final panel and it would have something to actually sit up against and not have to create
some sort of a structure to hold everything up now typically speaking i use a water thin cement to
to uh to cement the edges of an acrylic aquarium but when it came to this i didn't really really
think or i didn't have the proper platform to build this on having a flat desk is great but i
needed to be able to get under this with clamps and i just couldn't make it happen so i used a
thicker cement almost like very runny silicone to do those seams lined it all up and then simply
place that panel down and weighted it down of course now that stuff takes much longer to cure
and or at least you have to wait a few hours before you can start messing with it again so
i moved on to building all three tanks at once as always we'll do the front the sides and the
back panel first and then once those are done we take them and put them onto the base of the tank
now even though everything was cut precisely to size and exactly what i needed it to be
i always kind of push the sides in a little bit just to ensure i have a little bit of overhang
that i can router off to make them absolutely perfect because when you're doing this by hand
sometimes it'll move or something might not line up exactly perfectly and you might not
get a finished edge so i love making things a little slightly a millimeter or two smaller than
they're supposed to be just so i can come back and create a snowstorm in the gallery because
it's winter in canada and apparently i'm not getting enough snow i router off all the excess
acrylic and then i round them with another router bit that lets me have more of a finished edge
finally coming back to it with a map gas torch to polish the edges and i gotta say these things
turned out absolutely beautiful the dimensions of these three individual tanks they're 12 by 12 by
12 a foot by a foot by a foot 30 centimeters but 30 centimeters by 30 centimeters roughly anyways
it's a it's a 7.5 gallon cube seven and a half seven and a half seven and a half
the bridge is also seven and a half gallons making this a total of 30 gallon system the bridge is
where things got complicated when i was putting the bridge together i was stressing about how i'm
going to create these archways and i realized it's not about creating the archways right now
because i thought to myself why don't i just cut out the notches and then cement it together that
would have made the the clamping process so much easier but i also knew that if i put them
on in advance and routed them out i'd have a much cleaner look so we did just that finally routing
off all the edges it is a little messy with some of the uh thicker acrylic cement that i used but
the seams are great in most places i don't need this to be beautiful i need it to hold water
and i need it to be airtight there can't even be a pinhole in this one little pinhole air slowly
starts to leak into this and all that water has to go somewhere it's going to go into those tanks
and those tanks are already going to be filled i'm just going to end up flooding the area now
a bit of a blooper i know that sometimes i make things look so easy uh and that's not me thinking
that that's me reading your comments and playing like you go you make this stuff look so easy
sometimes it's not and sometimes i screw things up including light my aquariums on fire did i mention
acrylic is flammable and when you're using the map torch it burns hotter than propane and if you
spend too much time in one place you won't even notice that it's caught on fire until you're like
way off so there's been parts of this and the tanks themselves that have been victim to fires
only twice though two times is acceptable three times unacceptable so we have our three aquariums
and these three aquariums get evenly spaced
by what i would estimate to be i'll just get a measuring tape just a second
seven inches so they're spaced by seven inches not a massive gap in between them but i wanted
the bridge to only be four foot long because like i said the acrylic sheet is eight by four
and in order to fit all of this into one cheek plus there's extra acrylic to build another tank
maybe we'll do something with that in the near future but the focus was on making this four feet
long so the tanks are spread four feet and it can go onto a stand that is four feet to fit a perfect
place that we've designed this small little area around and everything's going to be matching it's
going to be beautiful how do these even work well of course we're going to fill these tanks up with
water and as the tanks fill up with water i've shown you how this works before gets the top um
and obviously the air is gonna be trapped in here all we have to do is suck water out all that water
is gonna start sucking in we continue to fill these tanks and it completely floods the entire
bridge this whole system is only 30 gallons we can add a filter to one side and the or the intake
of a filter to one side the output to another and it will filter all three through the bridge
fish will be able to swim up through the bottom and all the way over to the to the other sides
now i did make the openings um well the bridge itself is uh six and a half inches by 48 inches
and six inches tall so it's actually a pretty sizable bridge inside the aquariums the
openings are 10 inches by six inches as well so it's like half of the aquariums themselves
have access to the bridge i didn't want fish like kind of fumbling and maybe going up in there i
wanted them to feel like this is a part of their environment now of course the question's got to
be how are you ever going to clean this couple of things i mean we clean these with algae magnets
for example i can put an algae magnet in here i'm not going to be growing a ton of plants in this
system so i'm not going to have highlight anyway but worst case scenario i do 50 water changes on
all of these remove the suction out of here and simply clean it out by hand you know take it off
stick my hand right in there and start and clean it with a rag or something odds of me having to
do that pretty darn slim but the question has to be first and foremost does this hold water
i don't know i haven't water tested it yet i just want to get this video got out to you guys and
show you the initial build i mean building three tanks and a water bridge in one video is already
pretty intense so i'll have to run water tests on each aquarium for a few days as well as the bridge
to do the water test on the bridge i'm flipping it upside down and i'll just fill it up water
will come up to the top and i'll just watch for leaks around the apparent areas that it can leak
if it does leak i'll take some of that thicker cement and just line the edges
like you would in a glass aquarium with the silicone seams but the question remains what
do we stock these aquariums with i don't know let me know what you guys think in the comment
section below i'm gonna get to water testing this shortly building the stand figuring out
filtration as well as lighting there's a ton more things to do so if you don't want to miss any of
this make sure you subscribe to this channel if you're not already see you guys in the next video