The Big Tank - Buffing and Cleaning

Over the summer of my sophomore year I started the big tank. This tank, which is in its own room, is 1,200 gallons. I contacted Ms Fayyaz and got her permission to take over the tank. She was using it for landscape design. I also got permission for Jim Knowlan to go ahead with the project. One of the logistical problems was that a pipe had to be run around a door, and he was fine with this.

One of the first steps was to remove all the rock, soil, and plants from the tank. There was a massive amount of this material. I did leave a good portion of the rocks as the structure. After removing this stuff it was time to clean it. Algae was glued onto the walls of the acrylic sides, dirt was everywhere, and there was biological muck everywhere. I spent a whole week sitting in the tank with a bucket of clorox and a shop vac. Once it was relatively clean I filled up the tank, put in a lot of clorox and ran the existing pump system. (there was a pump that was designed for water falls and such for the landscape design, but it had to be removed and completely re-plumbed.) With the clorox, the idea was to eliminate all the things that were alive from the previous set up.

I then drained the tank and started work on restroing the side of the tank. When the previous people put the rocks in tank, they accidentally hit them up against the display side wall. They also used a rough brush to clean algae off it. The tank itself is made out of acrylic (plexi-glass) so it scratches VERY EASILY. You can scratch it with your fingernail. So the display side wall was damaged pretty badly. I ordered some acrylic polish and got to buffing. This was the single longest process of the tank, and Bill Matejovic can contest to it because he had to let me into the building so many times over the summer. The problem was that not even the polish could remove the scratches. I was surprised by this and email my friend Chris. It turns out that deep scratches have to actually be sanded out. But with really fine sand paper, like 2,000 grit. I started with a 1,000 grit, then moved to 1,500 then, 2,000 and then finished by buffing out the tiny sandpaper scratches. Some of the scratches were so deep I had to get out an electric sander. Many of them are still there because it would have taken me months to remove them all.