SO, YOU WANT TO BUILD A FISHROOM… Start with 12,000 board feet of milled poplar…
This is about half of the delivery, cut and milled to specification by Hardwoods, Inc. in Frederick. Call Paul Matweecha at (301) 668-9663. He runs a great shop, with the biggest and best hardwood selection in the state.
A common site on the job, the trusty DeWalt mitre saw, and a pile of scrap.
	The decks and legs were all built separately, painted, and assembled “lego-fashion” on the fishroom floor. Once again, I’ve got few pictures from this stage, must have had something to do with those 14-hour days. I must admit though, after working in a basement woodshop for years, the luxury of a 4’X8’ work bench, and two 2’X8’ assembly tables was nice.
The decks are skinned with ½” plywood to add stiffness, and provide a reflector for the lighting. The slot down the middle is for plumbing and electricals. All in all, we did the entire room with five deck sizes, and five leg sizes.
	This looks like the first back room rack we built. No coatings, I think we did it as inspiration for everyone. Weeks had been spent just learning how to make the pieces, and no one really had any idea of the finished product, except for your humble narrator. Of course, we needed some unofficial load testing… …quite a load.
	On to the coatings…
I’ve got to hand it to Byron, he sprayed the base primer and two coats of epoxy onto pretty much all of the racks. Thanks B! We get many questions about the actual coatings, so here’s the formula… Sherwin-Williams PrepRite Alkyd-Based Primer, finished with two coats of gloss white TileClad Epoxy. The TileClad is a two-part, post catalyzed epoxy paint, which sets in 3-5 hours. However, with the weights involved, we usually let it set up overnight before stacking decks without stickers. The finish is excellent, and we have only seen two small failures, both caused by abuse when moving tanks. Waterproof, and easy to clean, it is well worth the extra effort during application. Thanks to Karl at SW for finding the products for us, he’s currently in Landover at (301) 459-5005
Nick finishes off a deck with a bit of brush work…	…while Vincent and Travis stack them up to dry. This pile is about a third of a single day’s work. With over 300 decks, and a three-coat finish, we all got a little tired of stacking and re-stacking, and stacking again.
	I have no pictures whatsoever of actual rack assembly. Suffice it to say, it involved four guys, a compressor, two impact wrenches, loads of galvanized bolts, and a dozen pipe clamps of various sizes. You can probably see the issues involved when the tanks arrived a month early. Amazingly, however, out of over 600 tanks, only two were broken during construction. Thanks guys!