How to level a stand?

Wood shims

Originally posted by chefkeith
Wood shims

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Yup, that's the way I've done it too.

Wood shims are definitely the quickest and cheapest but you could also get adjustable feet pretty easily. Home Depot or Lowes would have a set of four for a few bucks.

If the tank is not on the stand yet (or is empty) I would put the feet in.

There's always that stack of pennies taped together

I would think a 75G tank is too heavy for washer feet, better to shim.

Washer feet would work for a concrete floors, but it would leave a dimple in any other type of flooring.

For my 6 foot tank, I cut a 6 foot shim out of a 2x4. The shim was 1/2 inch thick on one side, and scaling down to 1/4 inch to the other side.

be sure you shim the whole area, so it spreads the weight out

I just had the same situation. Luckily my wife works at a construction company and was able to get me wooden shims that were about 18' long by 4" wide and were tapered from about 3/8 of an inch down to 1/32.

I called All Glass Aquarium ,who makes my tank (46g bow), and they told me that with my type of stand (pine) I should only put shims on the sides (front corners) since the front/middle of the stand is not really loadbearing.

I found that when I was leveling the tank I was getting different readings depending on where I had the level on the tank (Top, bottom of top trim, top of bottom trim, stand) I ended up using the top of the stand as my final reference.

It's been set up for a month now and still looks good. If you have the time you might want to shim the stand, fill with water, and see if it settles at all before you cut the shims to length.

Good luck!

I had the same problem when I re-located my 20G, I happened to used a number of golf tees. Weird but it worked