Ted Judy: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Ted’s Fishroom. In today’s episode, we’re going to be working on my newest project which is a large vivarium going into this Majestic reptile enclosure that was built by Custom Cages. Let me give you a quick tour of the way it is before I start working on it.
Ted: This is a Majestic reptile enclosure from www.customcages.com. It is a truly high-quality furniture-style enclosure. The exterior is classic hardwood cabinetry. This one is finished in colonial oak. The cage itself has an outside dimension of 48 inches tall, 36 inches wide and 24 inches deep. The interior measurements are a couple of inches shorter on any axis, but regardless of how it is measured, it is big, probably larger than I should have started for a first vivarium, but everyone says go big.
The interior of the cage is lined with a hard and inert black anodized aluminum. This material will not rust or corrode and it is very hard to scratch. The back panel is a laminate of PVC plastic between sheets of anodized aluminum. This one has a photo finish adhered to it. That photo material is also able to handle the humidity, which is a good thing because this is going to be a wet vivarium. Not super wet but wet enough that you might want to worry about what you have on the back panel.
The side panels and the front door are a high-quality acrylic, which is lighter than glass. It’s better insulating than glass. It’s much harder to break, therefore, it’s safer than glass, though it will have a tendency to scratch. I’ll just have to be careful when I’m working with it. The top panel is a perforated aluminum plate with a 1/8-inch hole set 1/4-inch apart. This is a great material because it lets in light including UVB. It is also good for conducting heat, and it allows for air circulation. Custom Cages likes to describe their Majestic enclosures as a modern interpretation of a classic cage. All the looks of an old-style classic wood enclosure but built with modern material technology. I feel fortunate to have it and I really look forward to working with it.
The floor inside the enclosure is about the same kind of stuff as you would have as a high-grade kitchen countertop like for mica type stuff laminated around a wood center. If any water gets into that, it could swell up and cause a problem, so I’m definitely going to seal around the bottom edges. What I’m going to do is I’m going to add an extra layer of protection because I’m going to have this as a bioactive vivarium and there’s going to be about three or four inches of a soil substrate inside of it. What I’ve got is this is a hard-anodized aluminum laminate that’s got PVC in the middle. I could do it just with PVC, but you know what doesn’t stick well to PVC? Silicone doesn’t stick well to PVC, but it sticks really well to aluminum.
This is actually the same material that the back of this is made of as well. It’s also the same kind of material that the entire inside is made up, so I’m going to stick this down inside the cage. I’m going to seal it in all the way around the edges with silicone and it’s going to look very, very nice. If I ever want to pull it all out, all I have to do is pull the silicone and lift up the bottom out if I want to.
The aluminum inside the enclosure is not sealed in the corners, so I need to seal them with silicone if I want to prevent too much moisture from soaking into the wood exterior. The first task is to tape off the edges leaving space in the corner for the silicone to adhere to the aluminum. The tape is only going in to make sure that I have a pretty aesthetic edge to the silicone seems. I’m a little picky. I’m actually going to use this razor blade to pull out the excess tape in the corners. The last thing you want is to end up pulling out the silicone you actually need to seal the thing up with when you pull the tape.
I’ve got the cage sealed up, taped up. The corners are clear. A pretty good gap around the bottom. I’ll fill that with silicone. I’m in the process of taping up the corners of the enclosure behind me so that I can put a bead of silicone in there. Full disclosure, I actually did this yesterday and I made a huge mistake. A mistake that I know better than making. I used old silicone. I had some tubes of silicone that’d been sitting around for a while. I couldn’t quite remember exactly how long they had been there.
I put a bead of silicone in. I actually sealed up almost the entire thing and the silicone cured way too quickly. It was very clumpy. It had all kinds of problems you can associate with old silicone, so I spent the better part of the day stripping this out and I’m going to redo it. I’m going to do this a little bit differently this time. I’m going to tape up each of the corners, I’m going to do a vertical seam, and then I’m going to pull it, and then I’m going to pull the tape. Then, I’m going to put in another bead, and I’m going to pull it, and then I’m going to pull the tape. Hopefully, I won’t have the problems that we had yesterday.
I also have a brand-new tube of silicone, so hopefully, it’s not going to be a problem. I’ve got my brand-new tube of silicone, I’ve got my rubber gloves this time. I’m going to start back here in this corner. I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to do a pull. I’m going to use my finger to do a pull. Yesterday, I tried using a spatula. I’m not using all that much silicone, so I don’t really need a spatula. I’m just going to use my fingers.
I didn’t use a lot of silicone, so I didn’t have a lot left over on the pull. I’ll wipe that off. Now, I’m going to go ahead and pull this tape. Now, it looks a lot better than it did yesterday. I’ll give you a closer look at it, but you’re going to see some not so perfect areas. If this had been an aquarium, I wouldn’t left it seal this way. All I really need is for it to stop humidity from getting the cracks. This will do just fine.
Is it the prettiest silicone job I’ve ever done? No. Am I proud of it? No. Is it going to do the trick? Yes. Will the enclosure look good in the end? Yes. C’est la vie. That tape just came out. I’m going to do the same thing on the inside corners, and then I’m going to pull the tape, and then I’m going to let that cure for a while. Then, I’m going to tape the bottom, and I’m going to tape the top, and I’ll seal those, but I wanted to get those vertical seams in separately because those are the ones that are going to be the most noticeable in the cage. I wanted to make sure they look good. Fun part is doing this left-handed.
I think that I’m actually not going to tape the top edge. I did that yesterday and I didn’t really get much silicone up along that. I’m going to go ahead and try to do it without taping it. It’s going to be pretty much nonvisible anyway because you won’t see anything up against the top edge. The last time I did this, I put too much pressure on the cage and the cage went backwards on me, so I’ve got to be more careful. All right, just the bottom left to go.
I mentioned I needed to clean the bottom of this out a little bit better before I try to apply silicone to it. I’m going to do that by using Goof Off. This stuff will actually dissolve some silicone, especially that’s not really cured. If it’s been cured for a while, it’s going to be hard to get cleaned up, but since the silicone that is in the bottom of this is less than 24 hours old, it was wiping up pretty well. I already did this on the vertical edges and the top. I did it a little bit on the bottom, but I put a lot more silicone in the bottom, so there was more to clean up.
Then, as I was scraping and pulling out, stuff fell to the bottom. Now, it’s pooled down there. I vacuumed a lot of it out, but it’s still hard to get up. I need to get this whole bottom of this cage that clean to get a good silicone seal. I’ve come to the conclusion that the bottom of this thing, it really doesn’t need to be taped off because you’re not going to see it. It’s going to be under substrate.
I’m just going to apply my silicone. I’m going to pull it without tape. It’ll look fine. All right, it’s sealed. It looks a lot better than it did yesterday. We’ll come back tomorrow and take a look and see how well it cured. It’s not going to be the prettiest. I keep saying that because I’m not proud of it. That was successful. The vivarium has been sealed with silicone all the way around the edges, on top, and bottom, and the back, and the front edges. I’ve also siliconed along the bottom edge of the glass in case any water drips down the inside.
Even though there is silicone in those seams already, I just wanted it, instead of pooling there, to just fall back into the enclosure. I’ve got a couple of more things I need to do to this thing, however. One is, I’ve got to drill holes in the bottom of the enclosure for drains. Before drilling the holes for drains, I moved the enclosure to its final place in the room and I wanted to see if there are any spots on the bottom of the enclosure where water would pool.
Then, I checked for levelness. It’s level enough to not need a shim. I had a “Why not?” moment and poured some water into the bottom of the cage and see if it ran anyway. Then, I poured a little more, and then a little more. It pretty much stayed flat in the bottom of the cage. I drilled holes for two drains that are far enough from the front edge of the cage that the valves hanging underneath the cage should not be visible unless you look under the stand. This is what I’m going to put in there. I’ll show another little video about how I put this together.
What I’ve got here is what I need to make the drains from the bottom of that vivarium down to valves underneath the vivarium so that I can drain excess water from the substrate layer. What I’ve gone to do this is some 1/4-inch plastic tubing.
This is not airline tubing. This isn’t even the same tubing that you would get for an RO system. This is a little bit thicker. You can buy this at most hardware stores. It has an outside diameter of 1/4 inch. The stuff you get for RO systems and the airline tubing is smaller than 1/4 inch. This is also tougher and stronger than airline tubing.
This is a bushing. I can’t tell you exactly what it is, but basically, it’s a plastic bushing that you drill a hole. Then, you can glue that into the hole, and then you have a pass-through to it. It has an inside diameter of 1/4 inch, so when I slip this tubing through here, it’s a pretty tight fit. You can tell there’s almost no play in it, but there is still play in it. The problem is these are plastic. Most glues don’t stick to this kind of plastic very well. You have to have an actual plastics binding system. I’m going to use this Loctite plastic bonding system to do this.
It’s a two-part. It’s got an activator. You put that on both surfaces, and then you put down the actual glue on one surface and you bring them together. It takes about 12 hours, 24 hours for it to set. The reason I’m going to do this is because these are going to hang from the bottom of that enclosure. Over the time, I don’t want to try to put silicone in this and end up with over time, these things pulling right out.
I’ve actually played with that. I actually tried to put silicone in this. I left it for 24 hours, 48 hours to dry and it just pulled straight out. There’s absolutely no strength whatsoever trying to put silicone on plastic. It’s not worth doing it. The instructions say to apply activator to both surfaces and let it dry for 60 seconds. Then, put the glue onto one surface and put it together and let it cure. We’re going to try that with one of them here real quick.
The hard part is going to be that this is kind of a pen. I can get it in there. I can’t get it all the way through, so I get it as best I can. I’m going to take these two and set them aside so I don’t do the wrong ones. Now, I’m going to apply the applicator like this. I cap this back. We’re going to give that 60 seconds. Then, we’ll apply our bonder to– I’ll do it to this surface right here. Then, I’m going to put it in and twist it around. I’m going to actually let it sit a little further up because I can trim this later with a razor blade.
Now, hopefully, this will make it watertight. I’m not exactly sure, but that’s okay because when this goes into the bottom of the cage as I’ll show you, I am going to seal this in with silicone sealant pretty strongly to prevent water from dripping down through it. Since this flange is going to keep the whole thing from pulling out of the cage, I’m not really worried about creating a leak.
This was my only connection. Inside this tube in there was the only place that I was worried about it actually creating a problem with the connection. I’m going to go ahead and apply. It says, “Don’t put a lot.” I’m just going to put it on say, three sides like that. Now, when I put it in here, I’m going to twist it as I go. We’re really going to spread it around. It sticks pretty quick. Like I said, I’m going to let the end of that tube stick up just that far because I can trim that with a razor blade. Before I do this one,
I’m going to let this one sit for a while, and test it, and play with it a little bit, and see if I like it before I decide to do this for this other one.
This has worked pretty well. That’s pretty strong. It’s only been about 10 minutes. I’m not going to mess with it. It’s going to cure for 24 hours at least. To show you why I needed to actually glue this in, this is going to go down through a hole in the bottom of the enclosure, and then this is going to connect to the back end of it. Now, whenever I want to drain water from underneath the vivarium all I have to do is to open this valve. That’s open, so there is closed. Put a bucket under it, open the valve, and water will drip through.
I left this tube really, really long so that I have plenty of tube to work with underneath the enclosure. I can even link them together with a T and have just one valve, but I think I’m going to do two. This has got some weight to it. As this is hanging underneath that cage, over the years, I didn’t want this to pull out a weak silicone joint. That’s why I used the plastic bonding glue. This flange will keep the whole thing from getting pulled out.
The other thing that I want to do is I’ve got to put in this block. What this is it’s a dam. It’s going to right inside the front doors of the vivarium like this, but I have a problem. Silicone doesn’t stick to this stuff very well and finding an actual glue that does is not an easy to do. The substrate that’s going to go in here is going to be pushing up against this, and there’s enough support that it will keep it from being pushed out of the cage.
I’m not worried about that, I just want something to hold it in place. Maybe something like M-1 Marine would be a better adhesive. Damn it, Amazon. Literally 24 hours after I glued this piece of plastic in, this shows up. This is what I want to use. This is M-1. It works really well on plastics. Amazon said it wasn’t going to get here until after April 22nd, so I decided to use silicone instead.
During this COVID outbreak, I’m having difficulty in finding that kind of stuff. I have ordered some from Amazon, but I want to get moving on this project, so I’m going to go ahead and try silicone. Long before I ever put substrate in here, I’ll know if that silicone worked. If the silicone doesn’t hold it strong enough, I’ll strip it out and I’ll put it in M-1. The first thing I’m going to do, just put some silicone right on the inside edges, a pretty good dollop. I’m going to very carefully try not to get silicone on my acrylic. Press that up in there. It’s holding pretty good. Now, I’m going to take my silicone. I’m going to run beads, pretty good-sized bead too, probably going to kill this tube. I’m going to run it up the inside, there and the inside here.
The one thing I’m not going to do is smooth it out because I want this to be pretty solid. That will harden in there. It’ll be like a speed bump and keep it from pulling out. You’re all going to end up with all kinds of weight and pressure from the substrate pushing up against this anyway, so it’s going to hold it in place. Now, what we got to do is let this dry.
The last thing I need to do is I need to get my drains in here and I need to silicone them into these holes. I’m going to actually plug this up so I don’t get any silicone down inside my tube. The way I’m going to do this is I’m going to apply silicone pretty liberally around the base of this bushing. Then, I’m going to very carefully insert it down in here, twist it as I go, and I’m going to push on the bushing. Here we go.
Then, I’m going to smooth the silicone around it and up on top of it too, just like that. Remember, this isn’t going to be able to be seen. It’s going to be down underneath. The last thing I’m going to do is very carefully pull that out, and now it’s going to set. Once I have both of those in there and all the silicone inside this thing has dried, we’ll be ready to go.
At this point, I’ve gotten as far as I can get on this particular project. All the silicone is in, the drains are in, and we’re just waiting for that silicone to cure. The next steps are going to build out the superstructure that’s going to hold our substrate mound in place inside the enclosure, but before I can do that, I have to get the parts that I need to build that out. That’s going to take a few weeks.
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