LR wall construction
 

Hi Everyone,
Im fairly new to Marine fishkeeping and I am setting up my first tank right now. I have a 30Gal Hex tank with a herby overflow and a 15Gal sump. I really want to have a wall of LR on the back of my tank, going as high as possible. Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions on how to build this? Any Cautionary tales as to why this might be a bad idea?

It might be bad because it will make it impossible to clean the panes of glass that any rock is leaning against. This may or may not be a problem... the only other one I can thing of is that having rock stacked like that can lead to dead spaces with little or no water movement, which is bad.

I would use an epoxy to stick the rock together, or drill the rocks and use PVC or acrylic rods to build your structure, so it is stable.

Another question, just to show how much of a newb i am, how long can LR be out of the water for construction without significant damage to the life?

Eggcrate walls work great too! You can also silicone/affix your rock directly to your back wall if you don't want it to be removable.

Not a clue on your other question.

If you cut the rock in half and glue it will cover twice as much and leave more real estate.

Any tips for cutting rock in half? handsaw? bandsaw? hacksaw? axe? :-)

you should be able to cut it with a hacksaw pretty easy. if not you can use a chisel/screwdriver and a hammer (will get pretty messy, do it in a bucket/styrofoam box; and you wont get a clean cut, but it would look more natural)

I made one side and the back wall for my cube out of eggcrate and white cement. It looks really good and natural, but it takes months to cure. This one I cured for 6 weeks in fresh water to get the PH down ( started at 14!) and then it took another 6 weeks for the algae to go away.. I guess from the silica.

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y24...a/IMG_0337.jpg

Hacksaw or band saw work fine. If all else fails any competent rock cutter will give you perfectly flat halves.

Check out "Crabs" cube journal http://www.canreef.com/vbulletin/sho...t=45915&page=4 . Doing it the way he did it, will pretty much mean sacrificing some LR.

Lol, I was thinking specifically of those two builds! I like when people can read my mind!

Any ideas on what you want for an aquascape?

We used old dried out live rock to make the rock wall on our tank. We do tile for a living and hubby cut it up on the tile saw. We then used silicone to glue to rock to back wall.

I have pictures of the build at this link. Of course the assembly and build are on the back pages on this blog spot.

http://dianafranks260greef.blogspot.com/

Now that the tank is almost eight months old, it looks very natural.

You can also drill the rocks and strap them together with plastic zip ties. Less time consuming than working with pvc, etc. That is what I did with my display tank.