My 150G canopy build

Nice Mike....I am having serious Deja-Vu!!!!!!!!! Great work!!!

 

thats some fine work youve done there mike. always good to see some nice carpentry skills put to good use.

 

Nice Job.

 

Thanks everyone. I'm not all that crazy about how it's turning out, but I suppose some of that is due to the wood being slightly warped right off the bat. I wish they sold completely true sheets of wood, but that just doesn't happen. I got my jointer well after I started the project and I didn't want to start over. There are some design changes I would do the next time around to give it a cleaner look. I didn't get a chance to work on it tonight, nor will I tomorrow.
I am planning on adding the front skin, weather sealing inside soon, latex painting the inside, putting some crown molding to cover up the exposed plywood edges, then staining the outside. Then after all that, wireup the lights. Hopefully I will have it all done by the end of the weekend? I can hope the the staining and painting will dry fast enough for that to happen.

 

i know what you mean as a wood working hobbiest i just built a stand for my 48" 120 and as you said i wish trees grew straighter, great build...

 

I finally got more work done on my canopy. I painted the inside white latex and had to let it dry.
I also made the mounts for the T5 lights. I am using 4x54w Geismann retros. I put each of the standoffs on an acrylic plate, which mounts onto a piece of wood that has holes drilled for the wires to run through. I routed out a channel for the wires to run through, to make it nice and clean, and to prevent the wires from sagging. One bummer is that my 4" cooling fans are too big to fit into the side of my canopy. I may have to go with 3" ones.
My next task is to make an acrylic splash guard for the ballasts. I'll just bend some 1/8" stock and make a box for them. I'll also be making a junction box for the AC input voltage to connect to switches, so I can turn them on and off easily.

 

I'm almost done with my canopy, finally. Just a few more finishing touches...
After painting the inside, I stained the outside a honey color to match my existing stand. I finished wiring in the ballasts as well.

 

After everything was dried, I fired up the lights to make sure everything was wired correctly. I added switches to my lights as well, which I mounted to the side of the fixture. With the T5 endcaps in place, there wasn't enough room to mount cooling fans on the sides of the fixture. If heat becomes a problem, I will add cooling fans to the top of the fixture to exhaust the hot air up and out of the canopy. I used a standard stainless steel piano hinge on top, and put in a stainless stell handle on the front.
The corners aren't very aestetically pleasing, so I am going to add some crown molding to the top to cover up the seam, and also got some oak corners to clean up the vertical edges of the corners. It's almost there, I should be able to finish it by the weekend.

 

great job, a little crown molding/trim will really dress it up. cant wait for FTS of this beast on top. K+

 

Finally complete and running!
Thanks for all the nice compliments! It's not as nice as I originally hoped, but I'm happy with it. I've made mental notes on what to do better next time to make the joints look nicer and cleaner.