smidey

it's also a buyers market now so don't buy anything until you have spoken to the stihl shop, you may be surprised in the price they are prepared to offer.

the ryobi may be comparable to the stihl today but compare them again in 5 years time & see how they compare then. i think you'll find the stihl will be just as good then & the ryobi may be a little worse for wear. i think you may be better off buying a used stihl or husqy over a new ryobi or poulan, i have an old jonsered that still goes really well so they could be worth a look. i inherited the j'red so not sure of its history but it does leak all the chain bar lube out the bottom so again something like a stihl is what i would buy if i need to.

scratching or diving on their side to the bottom? if it's the later many of africans have done that over the years & no health issues ever showed, i think it's just a behavioral trait.

cool, that's why i asked if you were aware of it. it will be sweet until the boys want to compete for the girls, hopefully with them being together as fry they may not go mental but there is a good chance they will.

time will tell how it turns out, i hope peacefully but there's an even chance it won't be.

of course but it will be much sooner before they become a problem, i tried the same thing & once they hit around 5 inches they wanted to breed & it was all on at that point.

cool, nice start. are you aware that the giraffes are going to get too large for that tank?

my brother in law has a prius & is getting about 5.5L/100km out of his. the latest nissan micra is rated at 6.6 (the prius does more open rd driving so the micra will rate better in those conditions) so the gap between them isn't that great. especially when you take into count the $6k he just spent putting new batteries in the prius.

that is great to watch but it reminds me of the idea of a rechargable electric car. "Hey, look at me in my car with no emmisions at all, the world is saved!" meanwhile, back at the ranch there is a coal or nuclear plant generating the energy in the first place. all that construction method does is make the building erection happen faster by shifting the labour from on site into a factory which does save time in the long run but not a major percentage over all.

i used DPC for both & there has been no compression of any of it. First i packed up the low end of the stand to get the overall length level & then i packed up each leg in between as it needed it to be supported. once the stand inself was level i placed the tank on the poly & used the dpc under the poly to make it tight under the tank. another similar product that should be easy to get hold of is a High Pressure Laminate like Formica that they use to make kitchen bench tops. Any cabinet maker or benchtop factory will have plenty of off cuts. when you say level the top are you saying you are going to use the liquid nails like a levelling compound or use it where there is a gap between the ply & frame? don't trust the ply to be straight. EDIT: Have you got a straight edge that you can use to tell exactely where the frame is not flat?

possibly although over a long period the poly may sag & fall to pieces in the middle & the edges would eventually be effected. in saying all this about the poly, i watched a video of a 2000L+- tank on MFK or Cichlid-forum & they put it straight onto the timber stand, no poly at all.

really all that needs to be achieved is the tank must be fully supported around the edges & as far in as you can whether it's the stand or tank that isn't perfect. The stand will never be perfect & the tank may not be perfect either but is more likely to be perfect than the stand. What i did with mt 2.0m tank was made the stand complete with the top panel fitted which was pretty good but not perfect so i put two layers of 10mm poly & sat the tank on top. there were a couple of areas where the tank was not touching the poly around the edge so i packed them up by sliding the DPC under the poly so it was tight under the tank. that way the tank is supported all round & won't be stressing anywhere not supported. The ply won't be dead straight & can vary in thickness through the sheet so i think packing between the ply & poly will be easiest as long as the stand & poly are close to was is needed. i would screw the ply to the frame & pack the poly to suit with DPC.

not true, don't forget the base of my tank from greg that was more useful as a skate board ramp. i don't think the liquid nails will be much good as a compound under that weight.

i'm surprised the PC Police have let that video run with eleventeen year olds driving cars without wearing their seat belts :lol:

i'm 31 to & i had no idea what it referred to. All the movies i remeber from the 80's are Rambo, Cammando, karate kid, Jaws, Back to the future, beetlejuice, beverly hills cop, ghost buster & i could probably drum up a few more if i had to.

in my in-laws pond his gold fish come to the surface gasping if he leaves the hose on too long. he hasn't lost any but he also hasn't left the hose on for that long. I think it is the oxygen that hurts them.

nice tank, congrats. to pack up the stand level on my 2.0m tank i used "DPC" which is a bitumus paper designed to go between timber & concrete to stop moisture getting to the timber. It is used between the bottom plate of house walls & the concrete slab so the weight isn't going to be an issue. it comes in rolls f varying width & is about 0.9 of a mm thick IIRC. best of all it is cheap, like $10 for a 20m roll.

personally i have too many other things on my plate to make it a priority, it was back when we tried to but i made the extra effort. maybe a winter club for when we can't spend so much time hunting, fishing, golf etc.

we tried but it never worked due to a lack of participants. i think there was only 4 of us that attended two trial meetings, i certainly don't have time to attend any more either.

that'll do it, i am sure that will be 10 times more than you need

it can always be worse so glad to hear they are the more common ones. what are you planning to do about cleaning the tanks & filters etc?

that sucks indeed, any "special" breeds in the losses?

our local runs all the freshwater tanks on each long side of the room off two sumps, one for each wall. The sumps themselves are plastic cattle troughs with the auto fill attached. The have a couple of pumps from each sump running into inch pvc piping & each tank has a pvc tap which controls the amount of water that each tank receives. each row of tanks then overflow into a common drain pipe which flows into a 65mm ish pipe which then flows into a single 120mm ish pipe back into the sump. i am not exactly sure how they do it although with that many tanks there is a large amount of evaporation & I know they turn on the auto fill tap every morning. In the sump they have bread crates which hold the media in layers, they have the filter wool on the top then two bread crates with plastic bio balls. It seems to work very well, when i send fish away they are kind enough to allow me to place a breeding net in their sump to hold my fish until i return in the afternoon to bag & send the fish.

i agree. It was unreal watching where they bit the cow & followed it for weeks until it almost died of infection so they could bring it down, talk about persistent.

that has been an awesome show so far i bet tonights will be great.