Tropical Fish

For combination woodwork / tropical fish enthusiasts (now that won’t leave much time to watch TV!), my son’s tropical fish blog is here.

Aquarium Cabinet #3

Now home to a whole bunch of scaly creatures, the third aquarium cabinet is complete. As always a few challenges, not least that each aquarium weighs about 60 kg (130 lbs), so the construction needs to be quite strong. The three shelves holding the fish tanks are mortised into the uprights like this:

Aquarium shelves are supported on 45x30mm and 65x18mm ribs, morticed into the 45x45mm uprights.

The completed cabinet has three shelves for fish tanks (each holding 55 litres), with an additional shelf at the top for all the elctrics (air-pumps, power distribution etc). Fluorescent lighting is mounted on the underside of the three top shelves.

The completed aquarium cabinet.

This cabinet has few extras that the previous cabinets never had, including a slightly fancier crown piece, with simple inlays. The crown piece is constructed of standard clear pine, with a rimu decoration, and pine inlays into the rimu.

Crown

Close-up of inlay.

I tried something new on this cabinet, which was to make an inlay of an Amazon catfish (Corydoras, for the specialists!). I made this by painting a 6mm sheet of MDF with acrylic glazes, until the colour was nice and rich. I then cut out the shape of the fish with a fret-saw (by hand), using a template of a fish. The eye was added last.  I traced the outline of the fish onto the plywood of the door, and routed by hand (as far as possible) the shape of the fish. A small clean-up with a chisel, and them the fish was glued into place.

Inlaid Corydoras, made of MDF and decorated with acrylic glazes.

Finally, for a slightly different look, I found these door-knobs at a local importer of Indian crafts:

Ceramic door knobs from India.