Yeah, didn't see any of the accessories. That does look sharp though. Is resealing them especially difficult or do people just not do it?
As you can see in the pic, the glass panels are held in the ss frame with a thick black adhesive that is very soft when the tanks are new. When filled with water, each glass pane is pressed against the frame, so much so that it is often necessary to trim the excess sealant that seeps out around the outside edges of the frame (and looks terrible). But so far so good.
With time, the sealant hardens, and if the tank is emptied, the glass panels pop back into their original position, but the sealant does not, leaving gaps between the glass panes and the sealant. These tanks almost invariably leak when refilled with water.
Back in the day you could buy tubes of a material that was basically just a thinned-out version of the sealant, and you could apply this to the outside of the tank (this never worked) or to the inside (this rarely worked). The only sure-fire way to repair these tanks was to disassemble them- not an easy task, especially as they have heavy slate bottoms- remove the hardened sealant, and reassemble with fresh sealant. In practice, the best option was to avoid the problem altogether by keeping the tanks full of water at all times.
So you can see why modern tanks with silicone sealant took over the market, especially as they were much less expensive.
