acrylic repair?

[dave w]

Hello folks, I'm new to WAMAS but not really new to saltwater. But I've been out of the hobby for a while and am quite surprised to see how far the state of the art has come along. Anyway I have a 600 gallon acrylic tank on which a vertical front joint (corner) has seperated about half an inch, also causing a crack along the bottom (horizontal) joint. Is there a local company that does acrylic repair? This piece looks to be about 1.25" thick. Thanks. I'd attach a pic but I'm out of town right now.

[Brian Ward]

I would contact NAGA here on the board. He does great work and has built tanks for many club members.

[flowerseller]

Are you the original owner?

Does it appear to have been dropped?

[NAGA]

Post some pictures of what your talking about.

[Coral Hind]

Welcome to the club. So how many Daves does WAMAS have now?

 

I hope you can get that tank fixed as a 600g display will be awesome looking!

[davelin315]

Hi Dave, another Dave weighing in here. I was told before that once the acrylic has been put together using solvent, doing a repair will never be as strong as the original. Now, that said, I am not an acrylic expert, but was told this by someone I consider to be pretty darned knowledgeable. The crack you could repair by drilling holes at either end of it and then patching it with another sheet of acrylic, and since this is on the bottom of the tank, I don't think it would spread if you had the tank properly balanced, but my bigger concern would be for the seam. If that seam came apart then that means that whatever held it together stopped working... sounds pretty self evident, but when you consider that acrylic solvent essentially creates a single piece of acrylic and that a good joint should be something where you can't even tell which side is which as it should be completely clear you run into the problem that you probably didn't get a good joint in the first place and will the other seams split, too... do you see bubbles in the seam or is it clear? I'm very concerned about not only the split, but how you could actually put the thing back together again properly. I'm thinking you'd need to essentially park your car on it to get the seam back together again as close as possible with 1.25" acrylic...