Ted: Hello, everyone. Today we're going to work on the 265-gallon aquarium down here in the basement. On the last episode, we put this vinyl wrap on the outside and I mentioned that the next steps were going to be to put in the Universal Rocks background. That actually happened a few months ago, so what I'm going to do is, we're going to do another time warp and we're going to go back and take a look at what I had to do to prepare this particular piece to go into the tank and how I got it in here. Let's take a look.
[underwater sounds]
The background that I am installing in this tank is the Deep Water from Universal Rocks. I want to give a huge thank you and shout out to everyone's friend, the incomparable Jay Wilson, for telling me about this background. He saw my tank when it was empty and said, "I know just the piece." And a big thank you to Stuart and everyone at Universal Rocks for making this beautiful stump and customizing it a bit to fit my tank. I'll put a link to the Universal Rocks webpage for the Deep Water background and the description of this video.
The challenge that I have with this piece is that I only wanted it to be 35 inches wide, so the ends of the roots on the sides had to be cut off and the whole piece was slightly narrow for the tank. This left gaps at the ends were fish could get back behind the background and I really didn't want that, so I have to block them off somehow.
What I did is really very simple. I used Great Stuff, Pond and Stone expanding foam to fill the ends of the roots and I use a piece of cardboard to make a flatten barrier at the end of the root, fill it with the foam, and then once it's set, cut the cardboard off. The foam has been cured overnight. I actually trimmed a little bit of the foam yesterday, but as it continued to cure it expanded a little bit more. What you can see is that there's the foam is bumped out from the edge of the background itself. All you really need to do to trim it is use a knife. I'm using a filet knife. This works really well. A boning knife works really well. Something sharp and something thin.
All I'm going to do is, I'm going to shave this foam right off the edge of the background, right like that. What I'm left with is a complete blockage of where the fish would have been able to get through. I'll do that on the sides or the very ends of the roots. We'll also do it on the bottom so that the bottom of the of the background will fit flat against the bottom of the tank as well. Once these are shaved, this is ready to go back inside the tank and be installed.
The basic strategy for installing a background like this is to set it in place, clamp the top edge, and brace the bottom to hold it in position. I misunderstood that when I sent measurements to university rocks that they would make it slightly smaller to allow for the glass thickness. I guess they assumed that I would be sending outside dimensions, but I sent inside links and did not make that clear.
I've got the background clamped in place. I brought the background all the way up to the top edge of the tank, which is really where I want it, but it presents kind of a problem. In order to do that, I had to stretch it a little bit. This background as I mentioned earlier, is not as wide as the tank. They actually left it about an inch short, so I want to center it as much as possible, but when I do that, I'll show you a couple of problems. One, the top edge has a nice seam here. I can silicone that. Down here, however, I've got about an inch gap between the side of the background and the edge of the tank. That's not going to work. That's why I blocked off these roots with that spray foam.
Then, down here at the very bottom, I'm going to have some gaps as well. Now substrate, will cover that, but I'm not putting a lot of substrate in this tank, maybe a half-inch of sand, and so plecos, especially catfish, are going to find their way back up in there. I really do need to block this off in some way, but I am touching here on the front edge. Over here, on this side, I've got not quite as bad a gap here, but I went ahead and blocked this off with spray foam. I've got a decent edge for silicone, but this doesn't sit flat either. I had to put a little bit of pressure on this to get it come in. When you put pressure on these backgrounds, when you're done siliconing them, they want to spring back. You're actually really better off trying to install them as naturally as possible, but in that case, this one isn't really as flattened as I would like it to be.
I was hoping to install this with just silicone, but I think that I'm going to have to install it with silicone and spray foam, so put silicone in, in the places where I can attach silicone, let that cure for a couple of days, then come back in into these places, like this, and fill those gaps with spray foam. Once the spray foam cures, I can trim the spray foam so that it doesn't stick out and you can't see a whole lot. I think I might do it way. This will be a pretty solid, rigid background in the back of the tank that fish aren't going to get in and out of.
The scary part about working with backgrounds like this is that really you get one shot to put them in. You can't have more than one shot. Once you put them in, if they don't go in right, you can cut them out and you can clean up the glass and you can do it again but, boy, is that a pain in the ass. You're going to try hard. I'm going to try hard to get it right the first time. I've installed maybe four of these types of backgrounds before. Nothing as three dimensional as this one. I'm a little bit careful. I'm a little bit cautious about trying to get everything right before I put it in.
One of the things I need to take care of is, the top is pretty well pegged with these clamps and it's in place, but the bottom is still loosey-goosey and what I'm afraid of is, as I put silicone in, I put spray foam in, there's not enough pressure holding the background in place and it's going to get pushed further away from the back than I want it to be. I'm actually going to use some braces. What I've got is some two by fours. If you also have a custom aquarium, then you probably have a whole lot of two by fours laying around because they ship these aquariums with an awful lot of support.
Now, I've got this two by four wedged in between the front corner of the tank and this piece here. I didn't push it back a whole lot, just enough to kind of hold it in place. That's going to hold this pretty well. Even just one of them kind of keeps it in place. I have two two by fours. I was going to put another one over here, but I think that this is-- No, I going to put the other in. Better safe than sorry. There we go. It's not putting a whole lot of pressure on it. Notice, I left the two by fours up so that I could get silicone down underneath it, underneath the wood. This was a little bit looser than I need it to be. I actually, rehearsed all this, so I know it fits. See, I pushed this in and notice that it pulled this corner back over here, so I don't want that. That was too much. No, don't want that. Huh, it must've been it right there. Yes, that's pretty good.
I'm at the point where I really don't have any more excuses to keep procrastinating about putting this background into this tank. To be perfectly honest with you, I'm nervous as heck about it. As I mentioned, they go in once and then they stay in and if you don't get it right the first time, you have quite a bit of a mess to clean up to try to get it in right the second time. I've been really taking my time. I've probably pulled this background out of here a dozen times, put it back in. All those two by four braces in the bottom, I've repositioned them in different places to see if I like where they're at. I have measured as much as I can measure. I blocked off as much with spray foam as I can block off with spray foam. Now, I really don't have any more excuses other than to try siliconing it in. It's just making me really nervous, but I have to do it eventually.
In that first run, there's really pushing it back up underneath the edge of the background. Now, this next run is putting a thicker bead on the front top edge. I'm pretty much just going to take my time, work my way around this background, and silicone in the places where I can get the silicone in between the edges of the background and the glass. I might go in from the inside of the log and put a little bit of silicone where the background is touching the glass, and you really can't get to it from the outside, but it takes a lot for silicone to cure, so you don't have to hurry, so I'm not going to hurry.
This is one of those areas that I'm a little worried of being able to get enough silicone in. I can get some down here at the bottom, so maybe I'll just peg it down there, but I think this is one of those gaps where I'm going to have to use spray foam.
Now I've got the background siliconed at about as much as I want to do today. I've got this top edge over here siliconed, I've got almost pretty much all the way down to the bottom, except for where it's bumped up in the glass on this side over here. I've got this side over here siliconed as much as I can, but it's got this big bump-out down here at the bottom and I can't silicone that. I'm going to have to put spray foam in it.
I haven't siliconed the top edge of this because this clamp is in the way about the only place that I could silicone it. There's a bump out here that I can't silicone because it sticks out from the edge of the tank about an inch and a half. I can fill it that with spray foam, but I probably won't have to because it's going to sit above the edge of the water, so water is not going to really spill over it, and there's going to be a glass canopy on this tank, so nothing's going to flip over into it.
You really can't see it from the view you're at now, but the top of this stump is completely open and I want the top of this background to be a little bit flexible so that I can put some pieces of equipment, some plumbing, that's going to go- it'd be hidden by this log. That's a topic for another video when we actually talk about how this tank is going to be filtered. The background has been siliconed in for about three days. It is pretty solid here along the top, along the sides. You can see, it's not really moving a whole lot. I'll take the wood out so you can see what my dilemma is. You'll notice that without these pieces of wood in here, the bottom of this is pretty free-floating.
Now if I had big fish that couldn't get into these gaps down here, then I probably wouldn't worry about doing anything else to this background. I think I would just leave it the way it is because I'll have substrate on this and water pressure is going to push this back right up against the back and nothing going to get around the side because I already put spray foam in there. Really, that'd be good to go. But I'm going to put some plecos in here and I'm a little concerned about those plecos getting up underneath here. I think if I have to fill the space, then the only way to do that is with spray foam.
I'm really applying it just like I'm applying silicone. I'm just going along the edges of it. I'm going to let that spray foam fill up the edge. The nice thing about spray foam is that I can trim it and scrape it off the glass, but it's a lot easier to clean up once it's dry than silicone is. This is actually going a lot easier than I thought it would. I'm going to go ahead and fill up some of the space over here behind this root.
The spray foam has been in here now for about 24 hours. It is plenty dry and hard. I can pull the piece of wood out. Get rid of these. Now, oh yes, nice and solid. All I really need to do now is clean up the excess spray foam from outside the background. I got to be a little careful. I don't want to take off too much of that spray foam for a fear that it'll weaken the bond. I'm just going to take a razor blade and show you. It really comes up that easy. I'm not going to use a razor blade. I'm going to use a knife, a longer handle knife, so I can go along the edges and clean it up a little bit. A lot of that is going to be covered up by substrate anyway, but I don't want to have a lot of substrates, so I'm going to at least get off the really big chunks, like this here.
A fillet knife makes pretty quick work of doing this. It turns out, the spray foam doesn't stick to glass very well. It's solid, but it peels off pretty easily, but it sticks to that background extremely well. All I'm really doing is pulling off all the stuff that's really apparent and shiny. This picks right off the glass. You see how much spray foam I pulled out around the front here. When it's all said and done, it's going to look pretty good and it'll still be pretty solidly attached.
The Universal Rocks background piece is now secured in place and I've only got one more thing to do to make it look just a little bit better. What I need to do is I need to cover up some of this black along the sides along the bottom. It's because that's going to be pretty obvious. Even though the light in this tank is going to be pretty dim, I think that's going to stick out like a sore thumb.
I don't want to have a whole lot of substrate, so really, all I want in this tank is a dusting of sand. If I have to have the sand, inch-deep, little more than I want. The way I want to do that is I'm simply going to use this paintbrush, take some silicone and paint the silicone on to the foam. Then I'm going to cover the silicone with sand and press it in pretty good. I like using the brush to do this because it's a little more exact and I don't have to get it on the glass. I get a thin layer on the foam. If a little bit gets on the glass, it really doesn't matter because it's just going to be sand.
If a little bit gets on the Universal Rocks background, that's okay too because it'll just help it blend in. The sand that I'm going to use is a darker sand. It's actually a Red Flint sand. It may not match the background exactly, but it's going to be close enough and at least it's not going to be black. All I'm going to do is actually pour the sand pretty liberally and bring up some loose and then press it in. I'm actually going to just pour it along the front edge and press it right up against the black part. I'm going to let it sit there. I'm not going to brush it off, because I want it to be pretty thick on there. It's messy but, like I said, if I get a little bit of silicon on the glass and at the sand sticks to it, I'm not going to be too upset.
You'll probably notice that the place I'm not doing it is up here and the reason is because this is grey, down here it's brown. I'm afraid if I put the sand all the way up here it's going to stick out even worse than the black will. Also, this silicon is actually pretty shiny if I'd have been smart I would have actually put sand on this or another color, or a pigment. I may have been able to ask Universal Rocks for the same pigment that this is made of. Maybe I can ask them for that because I can always put an adhesive on here and cover it with pigment. There's going to me so much driftwood and so much other structure in here and the way the lights are going to be set up, all the lights are going to be focused out that way. I don't think it's going to be all that noticeable once there's water in the tank.
That's it, the background is in place. All the other hardscape that's going to go in there is something that's going to be moveable, driftwood and other faux pieces, rocks and things like that, of course, the substrate sand itself. The next step on this aquarium is to get it plumbed for filtration. That'll happen on the next episode of this series on the 265-gallon aquarium. If you like this type of programming, please go ahead and hit the subscribe and ding the bell so you get notifications whenever new videos come up. As always, I thank you very much for watching Ted's Fishroom.