[minorhero]

Wow that's amazing! Wish I had your DIY skills.

Thank you! I very much taught myself with trial and error and a lot of youtube videos (my preferred woodworking guru is The Wood Whisperer ). It's one of my other non-aquarium related hobbies but it sure is fun when two of them crossover. I definitely did not grow up doing any of the woodworking type stuff.

Beautiful job! I was worried the white metal brackets would show but they don't so

It's also great to hear you are feeling better and looking forward to more updates as you get your purchases in to finish it up.

Thank you! I was also worried about the brackets being visible (especially since they are so darn bright) but fortunately they sit far enough back that it is not an issue.

You should be - it looks awesome!

Really glad I wanted a few weeks to read the updates because this is terrific. Can't quite put my finger on it but something about them forces your eye to the center of each tank in a way that doesn't otherwise occur.

A magnet nerd thing: have you considered trying neodymium bars instead of smaller magnets? They may be worth checking out. In order to make the apron lighter, you could also try to machine out some of the wood on the back side of each piece.

Thank you! I seriously considered getting rare earth bar magnets but decided against it because its such a pain to deal with the installation . Making round holes in wood is easy because you just need a drill bit. Making square holes in wood generally means a jig and a lot of precise movements as dictated by the jig. OR drilling out a bunch and then using chisels to square off the parts the drill couldn't reach. The problem with all of that is that I didn't realize I was going to need more power until pretty late in the process. So it would have meant drilling big holes and working with chisels on the piece after it was all glued together which in turn would have meant any mistake would have had major consequences. If I wanted to make another one I might try using the bar type magnets from the beginning which would have let me do all the chisel work before it was glued up. But chances are this is the only one of these I will ever make

 

[minorhero]

Update!

For substrate I went with a mix of Safe-T-Sorb and aquasoil type substrate in a ration of 3:1 in favor of Safe-T-Sorb. I then took some leaves I have had on hand for a few years now and boiled them to kill all the critters I am not interested in. Then added that to the tank. After that I began building the hardscape which is exclusively wood for this tank.

The Wife's cat definitely took an interest in the process but fortunately everything was too wet for him to take 'too much' of an interest.

I played around the wood a bit but eventually settled on this:

Nothing is glued in place, its all just sitting there. Since the frogs that will be in here weigh less then a penny, I'm not too worried about the structural stability.

After sleeping on the hardscape, I still liked it. So the following day I planned to actually plant it. It was then that I discovered the stand is not flat enough for the tank to keep the doors perfectly aligned. On a shorter tank (like my original tank) it's a non issue. But these doors are 32 inches high and by the time it gets to the top of the door there is definitely a crack between the edge of the tank and the door itself a few millimeters wide. That's wide enough for fruit flies to come marching out so I needed to fix it. I tried various solutions but the one that seemed (at the time) the best idea was to shim the door slightly. This required a lot of removing and putting back the door. At one point in doing this I was holding the door by nothing but the handle and this happened:

Soooooooo, that sucked. It's not that the door was flawed so much as how I was handling was more then the structural integrity of the glass could withstand. So, it was definitely my fault.

130 dollars later and a new set of doors is on the way. But I really could have lived just fine without this hassle and expense.

Anyway, I decided to proceed with planting the tank and I will just have to use some plastic wrap to keep in humidity in the meantime.

Here is how it looks now:

Full plant list includes:

Pellionia pulchra
Microgramma heterophylla
Begonia imperialis Black
Begonia kingiana
Begonia maculata
Philodendron verrucosum

From the wild I also obtained various mosses and several small plants native to my area.

Plus 5 random small bromeliads.

 

[minorhero]

Small Update:

I got in the replacement door and was thus able to ditch the terrible plastic wrap. I still had an issue with the tank being slightly warped (99.9% sure this is related to the stand not being flat enough) but I was able to shim the door to close normally by using a shaved down toothpick super glued into the slot under the door. This doesn't sound great, but I am really pretty happy with the fix. Its essentially invisible, fairly durable, and easier then either rebuilding the stand or going through various trial and error procedures in trying to shim the tank ontop of the stand.

I also added another stick to the hardscape of the new tank as well.

Here is how the tank(s) look now:

 

[minorhero]

Update!

It's been a month since my last update. Most of that time the tank has been pretty static. On the plant side of things I added a birds nest fern and a couple of tillandsia. I also finally added in my solanum aff. uleanum (purple vining plant) which I VERY much wanted to make it but was only able to buy a cutting of. I typically have terrible luck with cuttings but I think I finally found a method for making them work for me.

Basically I took the cutting on the sphagnum it came in, put it in a deli cup and plastic wrap completely sealing the top. Made sure the sphagnum was moist and left it alone for a month under a light. I would once a week open it up, add more water to the sphagnum if needed, but otherwise left it alone. Once it grew long enough roots I transferred it (sphagnum included) into the tank and just put it on the surface of the substrate, didn't try to bury it or anything. That seemed to have done it!

Anyway Here is how the tank looks now:

But the real reason for this update is that I finally have the frogs that go into this tank!

I ended up purchasing 6 ranitomeya uakarii 'golden legs'. Of those one is a calling male, one is a probably (but not confirmed) female, and the other 4 are too young to sex. I got them from someone I know from forums and facebook for several years now and can not stress enough the importance of buying animals online from people with verifiable history. Almost every day on the frog facebook groups people are posting about scammers, so if folks are thinking of buying an expensive animal online, they should definitely be careful. If you are not sure, getting them to make a video or video call even showing you the animals they have is definitely a good idea.

Anyway, that wasn't a problem for me in this instance and infact they all came in looking really nice!

Even though they were brand new to the enclosure, they were all super active and bold immediately after introduction. They didn't even run and hide when I at one point opened the tank to get a better picture:

And that's all for now. I'll probably take better pictures with my real camera later on. Honestly though, I could not be more pleased with how this tank is turning out.

 

[Asteroid]

Reminds me of walking through a museum or a herp house at the zoo and seeing all the great diorama setups. Really well done!

 

[minorhero]

Small Update:

Just adding pictures from my real camera from this morning:

 

[Rob23]

Just read the entire thread. Your stand turned out great! This is an amazing build.

 

[minorhero]

Just read the entire thread. Your stand turned out great! This is an amazing build.

Thank you, much appreciated! It's been a lot of fun.

 

[minorhero]

It's been 5 months since I first planted the lower tank and longer since I redid the top tank. I figured it was a good time for an update. For anyone wondering about the maintenance of a system like this, well for the bottom tank during this past 5 months I have wiped down the glass a few times.. maybe 3. I also have refilled my water resvior a few times, maybe 4 or so times, and of course I've fed the froggies. And that is literally it.

For the top tank it's much the same except I removed the big alocasia on the left side of the tank because it grew WAY too big. Here is how the tanks look now:

In other news I have seen definite breeding behavior from my ranitomeya! and my Tincs are still breeding even though it is quite late in the season for them. I think I have something crazy like 30 tadpoles in my 10 gallon tank right now. They will be there till spring most likely as the lower temperatures in the winter really slow down the morphing time. That's all for now!

 

[hydrophyte]

Grown in really nice!