How to - Aquarium coral plant fish viewer

Hi everybody, joey here again, and welcome back. In today's video I'm going to show you how to build a viewer for your aquarium. A viewer is a simply project that will allow you to take better video or photos of your fish, coral or plants from above. Due to the shimmer and reflective nature of water, coupled with the rippling effect of moving water, getting good shots of your fish plants or coral is basically impossible without a viewer. Getting aerial shots of your inhabitants creates a whole new perspective to showcasing the life in your aquarium. Giving the fact that you probably won't use this on a daily basis, i wanted to keep it cheap and easy to do. Since it will be cheap and easy for you to do, i think everyone should have one for one reason or another. I'm going to first show you how to build one of these, and then I'll show you how it works, along with some comparisons. So let's get started. I'll be building this viewer out of glass. I chose glass as the materials to build it will be both easy for everyone to find and stay low cost. For the glass, i headed to my local dollar store. I bought 5 picture frames at 2 for $1. I only needed the glass out of them, so I removed the glass first. I used picture frame glass as it's the ideal size and it's actually cheaper than just buying the glass. We are basically going to build a small glass tank out of this, so I did have to take 2 of the pieces and cut them down to size to act as my side panels. To do this, I simply used a handheld glass cutter. I etched my spot, and then snapped the piece in half. Sanding of all edges is needed on not only the cut edge, but all of them, as I find the panels were simply sharp and unprepared on all edges. I also didn't need a ton of silicone, so I picked up a small tube. The small tube is also easier to work with on such a small tank rather than a large tube in a caulking gun. Essentially, I put this viewer together like a small aquarium. I used electrical tape like I usually would to hold the panes as I moved onto the next side. If you would like to see how to build a glass aquarium with more details, please feel free to watch my video on building a glass aquarium. With the viewer now together I smoothed out the silicone with my finger. I then allowed the silicone to cure for 24 hours. Now it's almost ready for use. We just need to do one more thing. The side panels of the viewer will leak light into the viewer and will cause reflections. So I taped off all of the sides with electrical tape to block out all light. Now we are ready to use it. Place the coral viewer in the tank and start snapping pictures. It's as simple as that. The viewer will break the waters surface of the water, removes the ripples, shimmer and reflection from the surface while protecting your camera. This whole project should only cost around $5 to make. Given the benefits to what it will do for you, even if small... is still easily worth $5. Which is actually only about 15-20% of what it would cost to buy one. Anyways, I hoped you guys enjoyed the video, I definitely want to thank you for watching, and we'll see you next time.