Back in the Game!!

I've been reading and hearing that both the Bubble Magnus and SWC skimmers are great bang for your buck skimmers. Most of the new skimmers have a "Bubble King look" without the Bubble King price.
External pumps are great if you are driving multiple devices, like reactors, chiller, etc. Another benefit is they will not put heat into your tank as submerged ones will. The trade off is that they generally will use more power.
SCWD wavemakers will get clogged with gunk and calcium deposits and you can end up with a flood problem if the pressure breaks the connections.
And cutting acrylic...How thick are you thinking? Generally, the best way is to cut it on a table saw with the highest count teeth on the blade that you can find. I use a 10" 80 tooth finish grade blade. Any imperfections will cause problems when you join edges (assuming you are going to weld two pieces together). You want the edges to be as straight and smooth as you can get. I just picked up a jointer to clean the edges of my acrylic cuts fwiw. You can use a router, but it's more work than it's worth if you are working with large sheets of acrylic.
Anyhow, welcome back, and sorry about the ex troubles.

 

These are internal skimmers right. I am trying to save space because my sump is only going to be a 29 [has to fit in the bottom of my stand]

i will just be using it as a return pump. But it goes back to the space thing again. And temp in not a problem we stay pretty cool out here in monterey

The problem is in that I have a wet/dry system in main tank that I want to chop out. Im not sure of the thickness, tank is in storage and I havent looked at in a while

 

Welcome back suckafish, I was hoping that you would get that tank back sometime.. I'm glad you're getting back in..

 

To hard to stay out of it. I may just be eating top roman for the rest of my life

 

thats what i plan on

 

its nice not to be alone

 

Yeah, I can see your problem with space. Those skimmers can be made to run internally or externally though.

Most of those pumps put out some massive flow when you don't tee off to other devices. You could probably get away with a higher powered Mag-Drive pump instead.

That will be hard, getting a router in such a small area will be tricky. I wanted to do the same thing with my CPR wet/dry, but that's not gonna happen. Using a small handheld laminate trimmer may work, but for me, I really don't want to invest in another router tool when I have 3 already. A Dremel with a cutoff disc may work though. You will just have to wet sand it afterwords to get rid of the burn areas of the acrylic.

 

This was going to be the plan. I am just hoping the acrylic is not to thick for the cutoff disc, I may have to bust out the crap air compressor.