plantbrain
Expert
- Joined
- 2 Aug 2007
- Messages
- 1,938
One of the main challenges for the scapers in the USA is finding good high grade rock, well, trying to find it for larger tanks, near impossible. It's just not highly valued here. This is good because this means a a nice rock will be cheap, bad because you have to spend a lot of time searching the massive amount of stone for a good rock.
I was out looking for rock today and found some larger stones that had some good appeal for the 200-400 Gallon tank size, such stones are incredibly hard to come by.
The tape measures are 2 meters x 1 meter wide. This is the client's tank foot print, another is 240 cm x 40cm, so if the client does not like these, I have a backup for another client and we will keep these stones for the annual rescaping I do for them.
Seiryu stones are tougher, Ohko are even harder than that.
I also found some very nice Black Utah lava at the right scale with awesome character, these can be made easily into Uzon stone that ADA has been promoting recently.
But they are about 20 cents a pound and local.
I bought 360 lbs of the seiryu stone.
This is a quick plop down for the scape idea that the client loosely wanted:
Black lava:
Top view
Once the sediment is in place, the sloping is pretty good with such stones, they provide much better retention than many other methods.
So some rather tall slopes can be achieved with these rocks.
Sediment can also better position the stones higher, lower, at the right types of angles, hide parts of the stone. I'll use super glue and rubber sheet for the bottom to protect the glass.
That can be cut off later once the tank is torn down and the rock is used for other scapes etc. Better than foam and light weight stuff that end up everywhere and shifts, once glued, it's not going anywhere.
I was out looking for rock today and found some larger stones that had some good appeal for the 200-400 Gallon tank size, such stones are incredibly hard to come by.
The tape measures are 2 meters x 1 meter wide. This is the client's tank foot print, another is 240 cm x 40cm, so if the client does not like these, I have a backup for another client and we will keep these stones for the annual rescaping I do for them.
Seiryu stones are tougher, Ohko are even harder than that.
I also found some very nice Black Utah lava at the right scale with awesome character, these can be made easily into Uzon stone that ADA has been promoting recently.
But they are about 20 cents a pound and local.
I bought 360 lbs of the seiryu stone.
This is a quick plop down for the scape idea that the client loosely wanted:
Black lava:
Top view
Once the sediment is in place, the sloping is pretty good with such stones, they provide much better retention than many other methods.
So some rather tall slopes can be achieved with these rocks.
Sediment can also better position the stones higher, lower, at the right types of angles, hide parts of the stone. I'll use super glue and rubber sheet for the bottom to protect the glass.
That can be cut off later once the tank is torn down and the rock is used for other scapes etc. Better than foam and light weight stuff that end up everywhere and shifts, once glued, it's not going anywhere.