THE FASTEST TANK CLEANER YET

These are three pictures of my home made swivel cleaner that I've been using since October 03.

I purchased a form of swivel cleaner that the dollar store was selling. The handle for it was sectioned in three pieces and screws together, and in turn, screws into the base. This was originally designed for floors. The original size was much too large to effectively work in my tank so I cut it down to a manageable proportion. With my limited tools, the only way I could cut this down after I removed the glued on pad was to use a router set up in a workmate bench so I could move the swivel around on the table and the router bit cut out ALL the interior ribs that supported the pad to a level almost to the top, but not quite. (The outer edges were not cut so as to support the swivel while cutting out the ribs) That left me with a hollowed out swivel that I then used my table saw to cut off both sides so the width was about 3 1/2 inches, and then to cut off both ends to make it about 5 inches long. Then I glued a piece of acrylic cut to the same size, onto the bottom where the ribs had previously cut down. Also purchased from the dollar store was a bag of cleaning pads, one of which I glued to the acrylic base and wrapped the cleaning pad up onto what little side there was. For the handle, it was part aluminum and part plastic so the aluminum part I painted with black epoxy paint to protect the aluminum from the salt water. For the most part, I use the end most section of the handle screwed into the swivel, but add another section as required for tank depth.