Rebuild with Rock and foam

[Bio-Nut]

As we have all surely experience, aquascaping is perhaps the ultimate challenge in reef keeping. You want the rock to look natural but at the same time you want it to serve the purpose of facilitating you corals. About two weeks ago I was trying to clean the back corner of my 90 cube and my over sized arm caught the edge of a rock and sent everything to the bottom.
So I spent some time looking around on the net and came across this thread.
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/sh...readid=1300282

For those of us that have experienced this, I am sure that this is going to be the answer to our problems. In addition I found this thread that provides a excellent way to mount the corals in the foam and rock. Look at the peg mounting video.
http://www.reefvideos.com/
Here are some pics of the process on my swap out!




More pics to come once tank settle out!!!

[WanaLeime]

That's a pretty cool concept....

ohhhhhhhhh the possibilties!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Trickman2]

Looks good, love to see the final results

[WanaLeime]

Did you read post about taking a dremmel with a "cone" sander fitting to make the great stuff foam (after curing) look more porus (like live rock) before adding the epoxy and sprinkling sand...I think that is a nice touch....

Man I want to do this!!!!!!!!!

[Techknowledgy]

This is very very cool. My next tank is going to be done like this so I am following very closely.

[DaveMorris]

I did the foam thing on my tank and love the look of it. I do recommend the dremel sander approach. It will give it that little bit of extra texture. Also...do not under estimate the bouyancy of that foam. I guarantee you that even with the rock you have on it now, it will try to float. You need a lot of wieght. Looks great so far. I'm looking forward to seeing the end result.

[Bio-Nut]

Yeah I totally underestimated the buoyancy of the foam. I put about 75 lbs of rock on the structure and used three of the smaller cans of the foam and the thing floated like and iceberg. I ended up adding about another 30lbs of rock and zip-tied it to my overflow. "KNOCK ON WOOD" it has stayed submerged. I coated it with bondo resin and poured crushed coral over it to texture it! I will take some pics tonight to post of the progress.

[Yolo]

Will be keeping an eye on this as well. Any reason you used the current foam as opposed to the black?

[Jessy]

I might do this one day... or I might live vicariously through this thread.

[Bio-Nut]

I hadn't heard of the black foam. And this brand was suggested by the thread, I didn't want to take a chance with have it leach into the water column later.

[WanaLeime]

Handi-Foam...pond aquascape sealant

It's what I used for my back ground





I wish I knew about the "dremmel trick" back then............

[DaveMorris]

The Great Stuff foam is considerably cheaper than the Pond foam. Contents weren't listed, but many people have used it and had no problems. I did not coat mine with resin. I just put gravel on it while it was still sticky. Quite a lot of it already has coralline growing on it, so it won't take long for it to look exactly like rock. I am very happy with the way it worked out in my tank.

[Bio-Nut]

I filled the tank up all the way last night and turned on the skimmer. here are the pics water is still a little cloudy but all is well

[WanaLeime]

It's looking good...like minuture scale of a reef slope in the ocean!!!

I noticed you didn't do the "roughing" or adding sand to the foam......any particular reason?

[Bio-Nut]

Buy the time I read the part about roughing it up The set-up was already in the water. I did put sand on the foam some places didn't stick as well as I wanted but the entire top of the structure is actually foam covered with sand.