Our 40g Island waterfall

[Misses.ReefWars]

Originally Posted by matt@concept

More pictures!

patience young grasshopper

[Zoaelite]

This tank has me rethinking how I do reefing .

Beauty in person, excited to see how the zoas grow out.

[Misses.ReefWars]

Haha now that's what I am talking about...thinking outside of the box thanks Levi!! .we are really pleased with how its coming along, all our collector zoanthids will be beautiful once grown out and the system has matured

[FishyFishy!]

Ive literally wanted to do this for years!! One of my favorite tanks out there was the famous volcano tank. Really looking forward to this!!

[Skimmer Juice]

I'm pretty jealous of the aquascape , one of the coolest tanks I have seen just on the set up alone .

[Misses.ReefWars]

so before the island we did the waterfall


for the waterfall we entertained the idea of buying an already made structure and simply modifying it to work in a reef , well that didnt work as none of what we seen online was going to work , so denny has a background in stone work and figured you know what we will just make it ourselves lol

so while we had our tank home we went and picked out some rock for the waterfall , the idea was to buy a thick piece of shelf rock shave the back to a perfect 90 degree angle so it sits flush on the rim of the tank in the back corner , with the shelf rock we wanted to create a basin in the lowest part so that we can put some corals in to grow. then we would build up and then down after the main plate/basin was created.

problem........


all the shelf rock is either very flat or doesnt have a already made basin in it


kinda like this:






so we broke out our 4" angle grinder and diamond blade and went to work making our own stone basin and working from there.


here are some pics of the cutting to make a basin we had to do......was dusty stuff


we had to make a plywood tank template to make sure when we got home it fit the tank perfectly



some grid lines up and down and left to right then snapped off the slivers with a flat head screwdriver , once it was all removed we used the saws blade and scratched back and forth untill it was all smooth.





placing the basin inside the tank.....yeah that was to much work and then we had to find a way to make it sit up there permanently ( cant have it break under its own weight right)







this was the dry sScape we finished with that night and was to be the starting point on the waterfalls overall design we had one main output in the front and then i made two emergency outputs on the left and right side slightly higher just in case a snails sits on the waterfalls main output and clogs it and water flows over the back side....couldn't risk that lol







brought home and a quick dry fit before we sealed it all and made it one piece still is a bit shaky!



top down of the raw rock after being cut out, still alot of work to be done on this before its running







next up: the island design!!


enjoy!!

ruth

[lastlight]

very cool idea it's going to look sweet with the water spilling over.

[Misses.ReefWars]

next up we had to seal the waterfall to hold water in its basin as well to make sure it didnt leak through the back and onto the floor , as much as we liked the all natural stone look seeing the water seep through the pores had me worried about if the waterfall backed up or if we may have missed something when planning , so we decided to seal it from the bottom and backside


good ol fijicrete to the rescue ( fast setting mortar) to seal the stones and then we used spray foam , 2-party epoxy and silicone to seal the outside and finish off the top off the waterfall


after making our cuts i realized this wont hold water lol




hmmm...big hole here...that wont do either lol



the lip of the waterfall , as well the emergencies on each side(less noticable)



the underside of the rocks.....see this wont hold water at all lol

[Misses.ReefWars]

fiji crete:



a can for mixing:



some water:



very technological mixing spoon




top portion of the waterfall also needed to be sealed