39.9 degrees and mostly cloudy @ 12:00 ...
Picked the machined PVC pieces last night on the way over to Home Depot, so I should have everything needed to put the PVC piping for the supply from the Magnum filter to the reverse-flow UGF together ... just need to glue it up, mebbe after a little trimming for correct lengths.
Returned some unneeded plumbing items to The Depot and picked up a Stanley Surform Shaver last night, along with two more tubes of GE Silicone I and a few other odds and ends that will be needed for this project. Still have to pick up the mortar, colorant, and acrylic bonding agent.
On the way back I stopped by the shop and grabbed some files, the two die grinders, and a set of rotary rasps for the die grinders.
After I got back, I commenced to whittlin' on the foam ... very, very messy. Kerosene heater is still up in the shop, so the only way I had to heat the garage was to just leave the kitchen door open ... which meant the cats came out to explore. Mainly it was Mister Kitty (the Little Squeak had been put away for the night), who seems to want to hang out wherever I am. After rubbing himself all over the powerhead/engine of the Stihl polesaw (in utter delight), he managed to track thru the styro shavings repeatedly, before settling down on the floor mat for my van which was right next to the chair I was whittlin' in. When I finally quit I had to clean him off ... I didn't even try to clean me off ... just took off shirt and pants and left them out in the garage.
Worked for about 5 or 6 hours and managed to get about 1/2 of the styrofoam I had cut shaped into rock-like pieces. It's time-consuming and gave my right arm a bit of a workout ... but it's nice to see it take shape.
I'm at about 12" or so in height with the backdrop, and the aquarium is 21" tall ... so I have around another 7" of pieces still to cut (backdrop needs to be a couple inches lower than the water level, to allow for water flow over the top)
So far I have just been stacking the pieces up on top of the undergravel filters to see what I've got, but that's a bit precarious because they tend to want to fall over, with their roughed up surfaces. Dug some skewers out of the kitchen last night ... might be time to start pinning the pieces together. Might also be about time to dig out the heat gun and smooth the pieces I've got done and then start siliconing them together ... simply because of the cure times for the silicone.
I think I'm going to try and find some cardboard and make a template to represent the back and sides of the aquarium so I can see how the backdrop fits inside.
I also need to get out the bathroom scales and weigh a container of gravel (with water) and compare that to a container full of water only of the same size, to get an actual idea of how much more dense the gravel is than the water and whether I have a prayer of achieving negative buoyancy ...
On the more mundane side of things, since the low tonight is predicted to be 22F, I need to run into the commercial property later and add the RV anti-freeze to the boilers and toilets, and hook up the heat tape around the incoming water supply coming up out of the floor, throw an insulation blanket over that, and hook up a pair of 500w floodlights in the boiler room to try and keep things from freezing. Have a little electronic thermometer that I need to dig out that displays the temp and what the low/high temp was within the last 24 hour period. Be good to check and see what kind of short-term heat retention the building has.
