The not so quite DIY rock project
(Otherwise known as:
How to beat the high cost of Reef Ceramics)
Greetings everyone....
Since it has become readily apparent to me (as I'm sure it has to those of you who have followed along thus far) that this project has fast materialized into the ultimate bass-ackwards way of setting up a tank, I guess it only appropriate that jumping right to the rockwork phase without having a tank present would be the next illogical step in this convoluted progression.
After all, what is a tank really but a big empty box designed to hold water? Water that I'm nowhere near ready for. So who needs a tank you say? Certainly not I.
However, given that I was a little burned out with all the plumbing I had been hacking together, I decided it was time for a little detour into the realm of artistic expression. It was time to rev up those creative juices.
Originally I had been looking at the Reef Ceramics like those offered by Captive Oceans, but after adding up the amount that would be needed for a tank of this size, as well as factoring in some excess pieces to play around with, it was just too cost prohibitive for my liking. It does look nice from the pics I looked at, but not so nice that I was willing to drop a couple grand to fill up a 7 foot tank.
So I started looking at the threads on DIY rocks. I especially liked the pieces that were being made with just cement and rock salt, as I thought they were some of the best I had seen to date. However, the biggest downfall appeared to be not just the time and labor that would be involved, but the mess and the space required to pull it all off. I just didn’t have the time to experiment until I figured out how to do it right. That, and I also wasn’t particularly eager to deal with the lengthy curing involved in the Aragcrete process.
But then I start thinking back to the current tank and some dry base rock that I had obtained from Capt. Jer over at ReeferRocks
www.reeferrocks.com in Florida. I had been pretty happy with my original order several years back and remembering how I had cemented them together using various shapes and sizes until I had obtained a reef structure to my liking, I began to wonder if it might be possible to create something resembling the Reef Ceramics using Capt. Jer's rock, and a bit of artistic license.
I placed a call and quickly found that things had changed a bit since we had last chatted. He was now offering a premium or handpicked rock for modest up-charge. This was basically pieces that he hand selected for maximum porosity, size and shapes of interest. The second thing that had changed was the addition of smaller "frag" rocks that were sized for the attachment of corals. I decided on 150lbs of premium rock (requested to be grapefruit size or smaller) and 50 lbs of his frag rock.