I made a mention in one of my posts on the wetwebmedia forums that the BEST tip I could give on working with acrylic was to make a thick glue to fix leaks. I found this tip in some computer overclocking forums...they were making water reservoirs for water cooling the cpus. The person writing said you could buy thick acrylic cement to bridge gaps, or you could just make your own by disolving small pieces of acrylic in the water thin cement. Well, the holesaw for the bulkheads left me with many shavings of acrylic to use for this...I obtained a high tech mixing bowl (just kiding...I hope you can see it is the bottom of a crushed sprite can)...it just has to be inert...and mixed up a batch of thick cement. I put in a couple pinches of acrylic shavings from the hole saw...and added the water thin cement until all the pieces were soaked.
I then just stirred the shavings until they disolved in the cement...you can add as much cement as you want...it evaporates quickly, and will eventually make a thick paste. After the cement thickened, I took the needle off the syringe and drew up the thick cement into the syringe directly.
Learning point#2... The thick cement would NOT draw up into the syringe without removing the needle.
I then ran a thick bead of the newly thickened cement over the inside AND outside of the seam where I knew the leak was. I allowed this to cure for 24 hours...I had no way to know when it was "cured" so I figured a day would be good. Well, after doing that.....
All DRY!!!!!!
The sump was allowed to sit for 24 hours full of water. No other leaks were noted. As of today, I am waiting for the tank to airdry completely to begin adding the dividers to make a functional sump. I will document this process as it happens starting tomorrow. I hope this information has been helpful so far, and I will definitely complete this how-to with the final assembly of the baffles within the sump.
Assembly of the baffles is up 7/29/03