where and how did you learn to frag???
 

Lately I find myself cutting alot of corals and I'm always curious how people do it themselves or how they started doing it. Post me your frag stories good or bad and what you do and dont do????????



For me I started with kenyas , I cut it one day and lost a piece to find it the next day now attached slightly, after doing it some more I tried other corals, I haven't fragged anything difficult yet but have done kenyas, all kinds of zoa's, gorgnians, pipe corals plus all the weeds lol kind of it's own little hobby now, so the new tank will have frag tank underneathe:)

Well, I just did a water change, and I just cannot stand the Hair algae growing on my hug piece of monti anymore. So I just started cracking the pieces apart until I have a few pieces of corals without any H/A on them, then I just stuck them back in between LRs. Noew they are slimming badly. Hope they will survive.

That type of fraging is just cutting. Wait till you cut a brain coral or plate coral with a tile saw. Now that just sucks smells terrible and chunks of slime getting thrown everywhere. I find you just have to go for it. Corals are a lot hardier then we give them credit for

Razor blade for the softies, frag cutters for the sps, dremel with cutting wheel for everything else :D. And yes, once you whip out the dremel it gets messy. Wear eye protection at all times!

Havent done much fragging yet as nothings really large enough for it but recently came across a recomended video of Eric Borneman on coral fragging. Rediculous! The guy is so comfortable fragging. Just like any other day. It was really informative. Have been googleing any video I can with him in it. His book is next on my list. Also Ive been googleing Anthony Calfo and watching what I can on him. Not quite ready yet for sawing anything but really makes me more comfortable on the subjects watching and learning from these guys.

Calfo's "Book of Coral Propagation" and as said lots of youtube stuff out there.

I read The Book of Coral Propagation by Anthony Calfo, The Reef Aquarium Vol 1 and 2 by Delbeek and Sprung, all of the articles on the subject on Reefkeeping.com and I hang out in the Coral Propagation and Aquaculture forum on RC a lot. I've also found a lot of good videos on youtube.com and elsewhere on the web. This isn't one of them... but I just have to post it again http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgbH04g6mXs

I thought that it couldn't be that hard, so i learned the hard way, i used to use big chunks of Tunze reef epoxy, it would get smeared all over the frags, out of ten, maybe five would look good, the other five would have dead spots from where I had handled them with the epoxy on my fingers. LOL
Then I saw some frags with clear glue, so i bought the stony prop kit from J+L. It had some clear glue and accelerator, Way better results, less than 10% death rate.
Now I use the ViaAqua plastic plugs, and the Zeo Vit reef cement. Most of the time i have zero casualties, no dead spots, and no weird chemicals like the accelerator.
Rather than using a tile saw, I like the old hand saw, hammer and chisel technique, i did this for a bunch of encrusting monti's and some brains as well. I found that it gives the frag a more realistic appearance rather than having square chunks of coral mounted to plugs.

After i had done all of these methods, my friend bought me the Coral Propagation book by anthony Calfo for my B-day. Absolutely the best book for learning how to frag, i wish i had stumbled across this earlier. Fun to read and not so much of the scientific terminology.

It all started when I was cleaning the inside glass. Within a very short period of time I was fragging my corals.

Tom R

Wow i just actually watched that and may have learned a thing or two :wink::wink: