Took a while but the stand is now complete...
Glue it up
All done. All joints connected with 10mm dominos + spax screws.
2 coats of Kilz primer, and then an additional 4 coats of general finishes high performace. This took forever, lots of nooks and crannies.
Took a while to decide on how to skin it, but I settled on 3/4" mahogany plywood. Doors (yet to be built) will be maple. Roughly cut out the openings with a jigsaw, then used my workhorse spiral flush trim bit to flush the plywood up to the structural part.
Then attached the plywood to the structural part with about ~25 spax screws per side to make sure the plywood is adding the needed rigidity. Made mahogany plugs to hide all the screw holes.
Attached strips of mahogany along the sides of the end pieces to hide the plywood edges.
Spent a long time leveling out the aquarium and stand. The lower level of the stand was specifically built to be movable so I could shim underneath it after putting the stand in its final location. Shims are a combination of pieces of plywood, store bought plastic and homemade wooden shims.
And here is the final stand with the sump underneath. Taken from behind but it looks good from all sides. The inside of the plywood skin was finished with 2 coats of GF high performance, the outside finished with 4 coats of high performance semi-gloss. Looks great.
Now the next task is the plumbing... Hopefully I can finish that in less than 2 months.