300 gallon acrylic tank patching?

Lemons

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Hey all, I recently got this third hand 8ft acrylic tank from a fellow reefer who will be moving. He had it for a few years no water and inside and warm.

Tank info: 8ftx30"x22"

Side walls 1/2" acrylic, top is 3/8ths


Theres some TLC that needs to go into it and I have never worked with acrylic before so i wanna get some opinions on how to best approach this!

There is roughly 5 extra drilled holes in this beast... and a few of these holes were cut very poorly :( and in my excitement of getting a heck of a deal on this I did not not notice how rough they were

the fellow reefer said he only drilled the ones in the bottom of the overflow, as the ones in the side were from the first owner.

His original plan was to place bulkheads and then just plug them up. I was gonna follow suit but i noticed a few of these holes are damaged/surface cracked. So i was wondering if it would be better to get some new acrylic and weld over the poorly drilled holes?

The attached pictures are the tank

20240516_161800.jpg 20240516_161808.jpg 20240516_161814.jpg 20240516_161839.jpg 20240516_161855.jpg 20240516_161859.jpg
 
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Lemons

Lemons

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Just buy a few pieces of acrylic and weld-on and patch the holes. That's the nice thing about acrylic tanks, you can fuse the pieces together.
Any tips for a proper patch? Any % of removed material that must be added back? Like 120% of removed material?
 

Rjukan

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Any tips for a proper patch? Any % of removed material that must be added back? Like 120% of removed material?
I mean, I would just overlap it by a good amount, at least 1/2". I used guitar string when I built a sump out of acrylic and it worked great as a spacer while injecting the weld on. Then pull them out once you have the gap filled and the acrylic will fuse to each other. It's cool bc it's not glue, it actually melts the acrylic and allows the 2 pieces to basically become one.
 

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