So I've seen plenty of examples of people refinishing acrylic tanks but I haven't seen many glass tanks refinished. The myth is that when you scratch a glass tank, it's permanent. I'm going to try to prove that's a lie.
I picked up a free 90 gallon that was "scratched beyond use as a display." I used that to practice on and now I'm working on my new 220 that I picked up from another member. It also had some pretty severe scratches but I've already done the initial sanding and taken out most all of the scratches. It is definitely more intense and time consuming but it's coming along nicely.
Wow impressive so far! Looks like its on its way! The interesting part will be after the finest grit. What tool are you using? Pad on a drill and diamond grit or something more like sandpaper?
Interesting project! What do you plan to use to clarify the glass? You can take glass to painfully high grits (3000+) and not get it clear without some sort of compound and buffing.
Also, impressive you're doing this by hand! I have a wet polisher and even that is a pain.
I've been meaning to follow up on this for quite a while. What you see above is 2000 grit. I used cerium oxide to clarify the glass. It worked beautifully. I ended up selling the tank because I had a wedding to help plan and didn't have time to set up the rest. Oh and I used a disc sander with silicon carbide sanding pads and a polishing pad for the cerium oxide.
I couldn't restore my tank and get rid of scratches. Even YouTube videos didn't help me with this. Great photos and I like the end result. Well done! Thanks to your publication, I realized that my second tank needs restoration. To be honest, I just realized that its scratches look terrible. But as you already understood, I can’t fix it myself, so I found these guys (https://www.unscratchthesurface.com/glass-resurfacing-services/). I hope they know their job and remove the scratches from my tank. Anyway, I am wondering if someone has dealt with glass restoration specialists, give me some recommendations please.
You did a great job, it looks really good now. I was doing something similar myself and I almost ruined everything. I always try to fix everything around the house myself like any other "guy" guy. Well I looked for a different types of power sanders and I picked a really good one from Makita, but I used the wrong sanding paper. My wife was really mad and she really got fed up with my "fixing" around the house. Anyway, the sander is really good, I tried it on different things with right sandpaper and It does a really good job. It is good for my home stuff and really does not cost much.
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