What was the last thing you built with your own hands?
Submitted by Nick.

Ok, so technically this isn't something I built. And I guess it isn't with my own hands…but, it's the best I've got. For the longest time now I've been unhappy with how my Betta's tank has been set up. It's kinda generic, the plants suck and the sponge filter I had going in there was ugly as heck and took up a crapton of room. So I decided that I would switch back to a power filter.

Betta's have a particular issue in that they don't like strong currents. And while my tank (an Eclipse System 6) came with a filter, it didn't have any flow control on it so it ended up being much too powerful and Fish didn't like it very much at all. So I switched to the sponge filter, but it didn't do as good a job as I wanted it to do on the actual filtering bit. So I would have to buy a new filter for the tank with some kind of flow control. But the problem then became that the hood of the tank was set up in such a way that it wouldn't allow for a filter that hangs off the back of the tank without modification.

I talked to my parents (who are much handier than I am with these sorts of things) and we came to the conclusion that we could cut a hole in the plastic hood such that it would allow a filter to fit through. So I brought it over last night (after being tricked into carrying a very heavy elliptical machine into their house that they had just bought) and we proceeded to begin the cutting process. After quite a bit of work, we ended up with a nicely sized hole.

I set up the new filter last night and everything seems to be working fine. Fish doesn't mind the current so much since it's less, I have more room to work with tank decoration and it doesn't look as horrible in there. Now I just need to figure out how I want to decorate it, as well as getting a couple of ghost shrimp to complete the tank (and provide some possible little snacks for my betta)

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