Jason:
Hello everyone. This is Jason from Primetime Aquatics. Today, we are at Custom Aquariums, Custom Cages, and Serenity. We're on scene. This is Mark. He’s going to take this all around the factory, show us how they build the cages, the tanks, the stands, and everything else. A lot of cool stuff here. Stay tuned.
Mark:
All right. I want to give you a quick overview of when you walk into custom aquariums.
They've got a really nice display going on here both with lizards and birds, and we've got some fish stuff. There's Kasha from Creative Pet Keeping. She's going to be doing some stuff on her channel. This is that tank on the ground. That is a tank that's getting ready to be shipped out. I still want one of those for my Maltese.
This is the large display to have in the center, nice-looking discus, nice-looking tank, real plants. It's got the wood structures in the center. I've got a video where we went over these tanks. We looked at the filtration system on the saltwater tank. If you're interested in that, I will put a card in the upper right-hand corner. For right now, I'll just give you an overview of what you see when you walk in, very large saltwater tank.
Here, we've got a setup. We've got some turtles down there, we've got some fish, and there's a chameleon there. This is something I would really, really like to do in the future, is set something up where we've got both the aquatic side and some land-based animals whether that's frogs or lizards. I don't know. It was definitely cool to see them. Here is Karma. He is a chameleon. Get it?
Karma chameleon from the song. Just a really, really awesome looking animal. We're going to go ahead and get the opportunity to take him out in a moment. Here he is, Kasha from Creative Pet Keeping. She's got the chameleon crawling all over. What was interesting, I got a chance to hold him as well. He's got a really tight grip. You can certainly see why in nature, they would be a boreal and hanging out in trees and stuff.
Just a really cool experience. I never had a chance to hold one before. Of course, you see them sometimes in pet stores but really awesome animal. Let's go ahead and get started and take a tour and see how they make these tanks.
Mark:
It's our loading dock. It's pretty packed.
Jason:
That's a good thing.
Mark:
Yes, working on just getting more space. We have very very tight corridors here. Just got to keep it up with the man.
Jason:
I love the smell of cut wood in the morning.
Mark:
This is our whole
Female Speaker:
Actually, it is a nice smell.
Mark:
Basically, we're shipping glass all around the state. We do pretty elaborate crates to the extent of almost building like a wall for your house on the sides of it, trying to prevent damage and just get the product to the customer as best as we can.
Jason:
Yes. This is a dream for someone who's got to build their own stands. What do we all notice here? They're all perfectly straight. I usually spend a half hour, 45 minutes just trying to find a dozen straight boards.
Mark:
You usually got to dig through the whole top of the pile where everybody else is re-stacking the--
Jason:
It's amazing thing right there.
Mark:
A lot of our aluminum, so usually the highest quality of aluminum, all marine-grade anodide. We have our own facility to store that, and we have approximately 20 to 30 different extrusions that are all unique to us.
Jason:
Here, again, we're starting to get into their wood shop area, and that's primarily what this building is. They've got a number of buildings on the street where they manufacture different things. This is primarily where they're doing a lot of their woodworking. I was very impressed with their shop as you can see here. They've got lots of different varieties of wood, thickness, types. It really depends on what the customer wants.
Again, that is their business, is to do things that you don't typically find in a store and try to do them at a much higher quality. Here, you can see how some of the stands are being built. Again, the craftsmanship was something that stands out. The entire time I was at Custom Aquariums, I'm comparing this at least in my mind to what you would find at a typical pet store. I'm looking at the stands and the build quality compared to what you'd see if you went to a big-box store, even a local fish store. There is definitely a difference.
When you’re talking about price comparisons and things like that, there's a difference. The one thing that we have to keep in mind and something that was discussed quite a bit is Custom Aquariums is filled with people who have to be problem solvers because they are constantly dealing with something unique. That's not something you would get if you go through a big manufacturer who's just kicking out 40 breeders, thousands at a time.
Their tanks that they get are custom dimensions, people want different-- to be able to see things. Like in one case, a customer wanted to be able to have people go underneath the tank. Think about that. This tank was going to be huge. We've got a ton of weight, you can't have a center brace in that tank at the bottom. They wanted to have an unobstructed view and there's going to be people underneath that. That's the kind of issues that they deal with almost on a daily basis.
I found it fairly impressive that so often that no two tanks are the same. They’re setting out stuff that the customer dreams up, and if you were to go to their website, you can build a tank to the dimensions that fit your needs and it doesn't have to be rectangular as we see there. Now, we're starting to get into the area where they're starting to do some of the finishing, some of the coating, the painting, the staining.
Then, again, we see lots of different options here so that you can fit whatever your natural home decor is. They've got a spray booth in the back that you can see in the far corner. Again, we could see all the different types of stands. Here, you can see, this is a nearly finished stand. Again, the quality of the finishing, the quality of the assembly. Once again, I'm looking at this and I'm comparing it to what you would typically see at a pet store and you can see where that added value comes in here with a stand like this.
As we continue to travel through custom aquariums, now, we're going to a different building. The building that we're looking at here, this building is where they do all of their tank building. The one we were just at, it's primarily they do a lot of work on the stands. They do some work on some of their custom cages for birds and for reptiles. Then as we move into this building, we're going to start getting into the actual building of fish tanks. This is quite the impressive operation. I'm excited to bring it to you.
Here, we're getting into basically the front door here and we can see all of the operation as we're walking through. It's a busy operation. It was "go, go, go" the entire time. Everybody was working. It looked like they enjoyed what they were doing. We're going to go ahead and take a look at how they get a tank moving from the very beginning to large sheets of glass, all the way to the point where we are getting ready to go out the door. Again, we got Mark leading us.
We're going to go ahead and take a look at the process. The first thing I found impressive right there, look at the size of that sheet of glass. It was absolutely enormous, and these pieces of glass can be 3/4 of an inch thick and weighed up to 800 or so pounds. Obviously, step one is we've got to get that glass into manageable pieces, and you can see how the pieces of glass here have already been cut.
We're going to show you that process in a second. Basically, you've got the stuff on the left-hand side and it gets pushed out. Then this thing is on rollers, it rolls all the way forward towards us. Then we can lay that glass flat on an air table and that air table’s going to allow us to cut the glass or allow them to cut the glass into the sizes that are needed. It's an automated operation. These are big heavy sheets of glass. Here, I just wanted to take you closer, give you a closer look at the glass.
Again, up to three-quarters of an inch thick. They go as low as 3/8 of an inch, but a lot of it is thicker than that. You could see that glass is as thick as my finger and this stuff is heavy. Definitely, these are very thick pieces of glass. Let's go ahead and take a look at how they get these things into the proper shape and the proper dimensions. All right. Here, we've got a couple of people going ahead and placing a smaller sheet of glass on the table.
It makes it a little bit easier once that table is up and running, you can move the sheets of glass. Again, this is heavy stuff and you got to be really careful at this point. It could be really sharp. Everything is computer generated and automated. Then it can take this machine here. This machine will do its thing as you can see here. This is a precision thing. If you've got a very large tank, the seams have to be perfect. You cannot have imperfections. Otherwise, you're going to have a seam blowing.
When you're dealing with tanks that could be thousands of gallons, that could be obviously a huge problem. That machine just went ahead and cut that glass. When you watch it, it doesn't really look like it's doing much. It just ran across, there's no real noise or anything like that. It's going to go ahead and then do the other dimensions as well. We can go ahead and see it make its cut once again.
Again, it doesn't look like it's doing a whole lot. It's not some deafening noise or anything like that. It's actually quite amazing. I've never actually seen glass cut like this. Then worker comes in. It's a pretty interesting thing. We can see here, apply a little bit of pressure, and these pieces are now separated. I just thought that's really cool. Again, when those are first cut, they're pretty darn sharp, so they're going to eventually have to take those edges off a little bit.
We're going to see that next. Now that we've got the glass cut. You can see here we've got this machine that is going to go ahead and place it on that apparatus. We can see here. Again, these are heavy pieces of glass, so you really can't have people lifting these things constantly all day. It would take a lot of efforts so we've got the machines with the giant suction cups that are going to place it on this racking system.
Then what that's going to do is it's going to take off those really sharp edges and give it a little bit of a bevel, smooth out the glass, make sure that we've got the proper surface so that later on, when the pieces are being siliconed together, there are no issues with the sealing. That's what they're doing here. It's not a super fast process. It's going to go through on this racking system at a relatively slow pace.
All right, so here you can see what they're dealing with beforehand, and this is a relatively sharp piece of glass. We need to clean up those edges before the glass can go through further assembly. Then after it goes through that machine, we can see here, now we've got a little bit of a bevel to the glass as soon as the camera gets a little bit better focus. There we go. You could see how things have been smoothed out.
You can see these little, little dots right there on the right-hand side of the glass. That's going to provide a little bit of separation so that when they do the silicone, the two heavy pieces of glass just don't push all the silicone out. That's a really important step. You can see here, now we've got an edge that's ready for assembly. All right, so we got those nice smooth edges before the tank is assembled, glass needs to be cleaned up.
We got to get all the oils off, everything needs to be polished up so it goes through. You can see the glass that is exiting the machine. What was really interesting is, there was actually a piece of glass on this light wall. I didn't even know the glass was there right. It was that clear after it went through the cleaning process. You can see here, it's going through. Again, the point here is that all the oils and everything needs to be off this glass.
We've got to make sure that things are sealing properly before they go ahead and silicone everything together. If there's oils or any debris on the glass, glass shavings, that's going to prevent a good seal, and so they're ensuring here that that doesn't happen, that there aren't things on the glass that aren't supposed to be there. Now, at this point, they're going to go ahead and do an inspection, make sure that there are no imperfections in the glass, no scratches, that the edges are the way they need to be for proper assembly.
This is an important part because this is one of the last steps before the tanks are actually assembled. You could see here, we got a piece of glass on the wall and they're also putting the tape on because eventually, we got to add the silicone. They want to make sure that the silicone has nice straight edges and that it looks good when the tank is assembled. The last thing you want is uneven silicone on a display tank. They're starting to tape that up here as well.
As you might imagine when you've got large tanks, most of them are going to be drilled with overflows and returns, and this is the place where they do a lot of that drilling. They've got a number of drills set up for different sizes that speed the process so that drilling would be done there. Then, again, we're getting an overview here. Now, we're starting to get into the assembly area where after that, all these other processes have been done.
Now, the siliconing of the walls and the bottom can be done here. You can see they got a number of tanks that are being assembled when we were there, lots of different sizes. Probably the smallest one that I saw, if I were to guess, was somewhere in the 75-ish gallon range. A lot of these tanks are many hundreds of gallons. Like this one that we're looking at here, I really appreciated that one. I tend to like shorter, longer tanks.
I think if I could have my dream tank, it'd probably be about 8 ft or 9 ft long, but maybe only 16, 18 inches high and probably about 24 inches wide. I think that would be an awesome thing. That's not something you're going to find at a pet store, but company like this could certainly get that done. Again, it's really interesting to see the different sizes, how some people want taller tanks and have them be relatively shorter. Others, they're going with the longer, more narrow tanks.
Now that we've got the tanks released, the glass assembled, we got to get the frames put on. We can see here. We got the guys over at Custom. They're going to go ahead and do the siliconing. This is for a top frame. These things, the center brace there is actually something that can be removed, which is really important for some of these larger custom tanks, if you've got large pieces of driftwood or large rocks. That's really important.
One of the problems even with the tanks that you buy at the big-box stores is sometimes, you got one or two center braces in there, and all of a sudden, your rocks and your wood. You've got a lot of work to do to try to fit those things in a tank. It's nice when the tank is empty to be able to take that center brace off. Obviously, if you were to forget to put that back on, that could be a heck of a problem. Here, the guys are going to come on over and they're going to go ahead and assemble that top frame as we can see here.
It's an interesting process. Again, the frames, even the frames, when you compare the frames here to what you would find at a big-box store, Custom Aquariums is using an anodized aluminum that's going to be strong. It's going to be corrosion resistant. It's going to be strong enough to keep those big tanks together where most of the time, when you're looking at a big-box store and the tanks that you'd find there, the frames are going to be plastic, and there is definitely an advantage to having a frame like this on a tank.
Here, we've got a tank that is pretty much close to being done. Again, I really like this tank. It's shorter, it's probably about 18 to 24 inches wide. It was somewhere over 7 ft to 8 ft length. It's just a really great dimension. Me being a cichlid person, that is a very useful size in my opinion. That was pretty interesting to see. When you look at the backgrounds, they can do lots of different stuff with backgrounds.
They can paint them a solid color, whether that's some type of blue or black. Then there are some people who want a different type of background. Here, they can have these things installed where there is plants or wood, fake wood in the background or something even more elaborate. That's what the customer wants. Here, we see a non-traditional size, a corner unit. I thought this was pretty cool.
All right, everybody. That was a tour of Custom Aquariums. That was a lot of fun. We'd like to thank Mark and Ted Judy again for having us come out and tour the facility. We really appreciate it. Again, check out Creative Pet Keeping. She's also got a video out of the tour. She approached it from a different angle. She's got her own spin on it, so definitely check out her channel.
I will put a card at the end, so you can go ahead and check out Creative Pet Keeping. Everything you need is in the description if you want to check out Custom Aquariums website or Creative Pet Keeping's YouTube channel. We really appreciate you watching. We've got a couple other really cool fish door tours coming up as part of this little voyage that we took. If you like this video, share, subscribe and we'll see you in the next one.
